I had the honor Tuesday of speaking with 160 high school students and adults at the One Life Project – Youth Voice event in Bangor, sponsored by the BDN, the U.S. attorney’s office for Maine, the attorney general’s office and the Maine Principals’ Association. I was the voice of an older person. Below is an adapted version of my talk.
What is our first impulse when we have a problem?
We tend to tell ourselves that nobody gets what we are going through. That nobody understands. But the fact that we all have these struggles is what unites us.
The irony, of course, is that everyone is incredibly anxious and dealing with their own internal messes. Everyone. We all might show it differently, or process it differently, but we all are dealing with something and, more likely than not, many things.
This might be one of the few things that we all have in common. And this typically begins in school and becomes especially apparent in high school.
What I hear from the students I work with, students of every background, is how daunting the pressures they face can be, and not just “peer pressure.” At a youth leadership program where I have volunteered, I met one young woman who, as a teenager, was carrying the weight of her mother’s alcoholism on her shoulders, feeling as if it was on her to keep her family together. This young woman is now in her 20s and is by all accounts successful. Another young woman I met missed weeks of school due to debilitating mental health issues.
A lot of this pressure comes from being taught to ask the wrong questions. This is especially true of our time in high school.
There, the foundational question has to do with figuring out the rest of your life. “What do you want to do after high school?” It’s an alternate version of the daunting question we ask earlier in life: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And it doesn’t end there. In your early 20s, it becomes standard practice to ask people you’ve just met, “and what do you do?”
This is the wrong question. We should start by asking, “How do you want to be?” This is what will dictate everything worthwhile about you and your journey. You can shape everything around this concept — job, career, temperament, character, charity, social engagement. You will make an impact based on the answer to this question; ultimately, it’s how you will be remembered.
When we imagine someone asking another how they would like to be, we don’t imagine the respondent answering, “a shallow bully.” We don’t imagine the response to be “a person whose worth is assessed entirely by what she wears.” We don’t imagine someone answering “most racist,” “the guy who makes women feel unsafe,” or “the person with the most clever insults.”
When you end up looking back on your life, you remember these people as sad — for the devastation they caused, from sexual assault to eating disorders to suicide, but also because it’s likely that these people were struggling with the same crap we all are.
Lashing out is how they dealt with it. This is how they stuffed that unifying struggle down inside of themselves.
“What do you want to do?” is a loaded question.
First of all, it’s a pass-fail test for which the stakes are unfairly high. What if you want to become a doctor, then change your mind? Pressure! Failure! Regret! Sadness! Anxiety! It also leaves us open to judge a person’s worth — and our own — on a job alone when we know that’s an inaccurate measure.
Pay scale and fame become our proxies for value implicit in this question. But we know plenty of prestigious, well-paid people who have proven themselves terrible, and plenty of people in more common professions who change others’ lives for the better every day.
Instead, we could be asking:
“Do I like the person I have become?”
“How will I be remembered?”
“How can I make things better?”
When our primary concern is which path we’ll take to get to which job, we are not checking in with ourselves in these ways.
Life is hard. This is something we share in common. The ways we sort through it shouldn’t be the root of our division; they should be something about which we’re able to commiserate.
We are all under tremendous amounts of pressure. Some of us are scared. No matter how it looks on the outside, we’re dealing with a lot, and we have that in common.
Let’s make life better for people like us: reach out and listen. If we need it, let’s ask for help. Let’s remind ourselves and each other that we are struggling together. Let’s not give into those who try to sell us temporary fixes to these feelings. Let’s not take it out on other people. Let’s be there for people who need us and build an environment in which being ourselves is possible.
I challenge you to rewrite your future around this question, “How do I want to be?” I encourage you to start becoming that person today.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
