Freedom To Be Me
Facades and the expectation of superiority
Even Superman, who can handle everything, can’t handle being famous in his everyday life. He seconds as a normal person, doing normal things, through his alter ego, Clark Kent.
Stars within music, theater, film, politics, sports, and other areas, even journalism and fictional writing, often seem to be working 120 hours a day, 8 days a week, knowing everything, being everywhere, and looking better than anyone else.
This affects the way we set our expectations when working with other people:
If you want to hire a craftsman for doing some repair work at home, you expect the one to deliver perfect work at a low price. Everything else will be complained about, or you’ll find another the next time. And you speak to your friends, and to online review sites, about your experience, pinning out every detail that might have been slightly less than perfect.
If you are hiring someone to become your new colleague at work, as it is often called, even though “colleague” should typically be interpreted as “subordinate”, you want the one to be among the best of their trade. You believe that the company you represent consists of people who are better than all other people in the world, at least within the business area you work in. It is not unlikely that you’ll secretly share your experience with an employee, illegally, with some kind of blacklisting network, to rule out those who are less than perfect from ever getting a job again.
But if you want to buy any piece of equipment, be it a car, an airplane, or a spoon, you somehow understand that there is a connection between how much you pay and what you’ll get.
People are not valued against money – they must deliver top-notch quality and “the right” attitude, or else you’ll consider them bad. The fact that you pay them a low rate for their work doesn’t matter – you find that their sense of professionalism should make them do an exceptional effort, no matter the price.
Things are valued against money – cheap means bad, and you accept that. Every thing is evaluated to be good or bad, “for the money”.
This logic is flawed, of course, as things are made by people, somehow, so when you evaluate a thing, you evaluate the people who made it. And if people are expected to be perfect, at least when you have them nearby and can complain about them, why aren’t you then expecting their products to be perfect as well, when these come from far away?
It is also flawed in that you cannot have all people in the world being exceptional. Because then, logically, that would not be exceptional. They cannot all be in the top range of their trade, as this would imply that it wasn’t the top range but rather the normal range.
If almost every employable person in the world has a job, it doesn’t make sense for all job announcements to claim that you must be in the top of the range to fit in. Because, you will be one of those “almost every”, and you will in reality range like everybody else.
But all the expectations to people make us throw aside our natural behavior and adapt some kind of professional facade, making us look like we really can do it all better than everybody else, and in shorter time.
Everybody is in the top 2%, according to that required facade.
Of course, when you are not delivering to that level in real life, the employer will have a natural right to sack you anytime they wish, because you didn’t deliver what was expected. And you were expected to be Superman, not Clark Kent.
Even Superman was sacked on several occasions, and politicians who did amazing work around something important were not re-elected. Especially trainers of sports teams seem to be sacked every time their team loses a game, which statistically should happen for one team each time a game is played – and if the kind of game has two teams fighting each other, and it happens once a week, it then means that half of the trainers are fired each week.
Of course, sacking isn’t nearly as common as that, but the fear of it is always hanging above the heads of us all, if we are hired for something.
So, we all try to not only do our best, and I mean the real best that we ourselves can do, we also try to make it look like it is the very best when comparing to others.
That genuine me, who I wanted to be, open and honest, collaborating to get the best results and the best working climate, doesn’t have good survival chances in business.
It goes all the way through, bleeds through all layers of everything we do, as the acidic blood in an Alien movie.
My CV isn’t an honest list of everything I ever did in business and education. Because nobody wants to read that. In fact, I have been criticized for putting too much information there – and when countering this by a “but, you wrote in the job announcement that you wanted a full account of my work life?” – it only leads to a contemptuous or even spiteful look.
My claims to be able to do exactly all the things listed in the announcement isn’t the real truth, meaning that I can do so much more than that, and have done that many times, but from that exact list there would probably be a thing or two that would require me to practice a bit more.
And my personality isn’t outgoing, always smiling, and making the office fun for my colleagues to be at. I am like that, sometimes, but I also have days when I look a bit sad – perhaps because I am. But sadness is a no-go for employees, as the employers don’t accept responsibility for that and insist that there must be something wrong with me if I am sad, not them. And they don’t want people with something wrong.
Therefore, I put on a smile in the job application, tell that part of reality they want to hear, and try to smile my way through the actual working days, if I get the job. I smile at the boss’s bad and racist jokes, I smile at the plans for layoffs, and I smile at the new rule that states a maximum amount of time per day allowed for toilet visits.
I make “a good face on a terrible story”, on behalf of the workplace and the people working there, hiding myself deep below the surface of a non-sad facial expression.
The same goes in the society, that also doesn’t allow us to express feelings or be ourselves. It stretches from how to be dressed – no holes in clothes, unless you are wearing a fashion piece of it that was designed with holes, and no dirty spot, even though it came from that passenger next to you in the bus, who spilled his coffee over you.
Always answering “fine” when asked how I am.
No angry face if people behaved clearly unreasonable, especially not if they believe that they are superior to you, being authority people or just dressed more expensively.
No middle finger raised against the obviously furious car driver who almost hit you, deliberately, because your behavior outrages him – by crossing the road in a zebra crossing.
No protests in public or private over any of the terrible things done by states, military, and politicians, if they are on “our side”.
No questioning about anything regarding how the society works, and how we can have people sleeping in the park when we are supposed, according to the human rights, to arrange jobs for everybody, and also supposed, according to our own laws, to protect people from living a life with less dignity than others.
In work and society, in education and social life – everywhere – I must hide “me” and my thoughts and the real details about my situation, giving up my freedom of expression in every thinkable way, because it all needs to be filtered according to the general expectations and, at times, some suppressive hard rules.
Every one of us faces this. We are never allowed to be the “me” we feel that we are, or want to be. Most of us don’t even know what it means to be “me”, because we never tried it – not since we were born and as the very first thing, screaming to the world that “here I am, it’s me!”
The freedom to be “me”, our birthright, ends almost immediately after birth.
Even for a superstar. Perhaps especially for a superstar. Which we all are.