Posted by finelinebob on August 26, 2006, at 15:39:08
In reply to people are doing the best they can » sleepygirl, posted by pseudoname on February 10, 2006, at 10:01:30
Sorry, but I gotta admit that what made this thread jump out at me among the sea of blue links is that I thought it said "'Help' by Garrison Keillor"! As if it would have been a book of recipes (Powdermilk Biscuits, for one) and sheet music.
I certainly can understand this notion of "doing the best you can." When I was 8, we had a tragedy in my family that pretty much killed us all, even the ones who stayed "alive". I grew up trying to heal my mom, to make her happy again (pretty tough, particularly for an 8 year old, for someone who refused to be happy).
That grew into my family relationships, generalized to my relationships with others, affected my work ethic and attitudes towards school ... it all just mushroomed. And the driving force behind it was my failure to do what I wanted to do more than anything else.
I grew up to be so twisted -- doing the right things for the wrong reasons and doing the wrong things for the right reasons -- and as noted elsewhere in Babbleland I am such an expert at failure, that it took until my junior year of college before my last fraud -- my intelligence and academic success -- was exposed.
But all the time, I had that notion that I was doing the best that I could and, ruling out the contrary, that I had no need for help. Even when I first started taking meds, I had to fight with the idea that I was just being a copycat of a friend who had just went on them and that I really had no need for them.
I can see the flipside, too. I was a teacher, and a teacher of teachers. Perhaps the greatest mistake a teacher can make is to teach how they learned. Teachers, by definition, are good learners, but that doesn't mean a teacher knows anything about how to help someone who is NOT a good learner, or cannot learn in the same modality that the teacher excels at. So, some teachers try to force learners to see through the teacher's eyes, and some teachers take a step back and try to see the issue through their students' eyes.
And, yeah, I've seen it here in Babbleland, where issues can get so personal and the zealot comes out. I've left a couple of threads in the short time I've been back exactly because of that ... because people didn't need any more of my zealotry and I wasn't helping, maybe even hurting.
I'll have to see if the library has it... the book, not the zealotry.
poster:finelinebob
thread:608011
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/books/20051228/msgs/680300.html