Massage School: The Boy

"Where's your bottom sheet?" the instructor asks.

"Bottom sheet?" The Boy appears baffled.

"Yes. You remember when I told you to get a twin sheet set?" The instructor is far more patient than I would be in this scenario.

The Boy uses one sculpted arm to raise the flat sheet that he's draped over the bare table. "Isn't that what this is?"

"No, a sheet set has a fitted sheet, and a flat sheet, and a pillowcase. They're at Target, right in the same section as the single sheets."

"I don't know." The Boy's befuddlement is starting to be tainted by defensiveness; I note that he's hunching his overdeveloped shoulders, pulling his head down between them. "I don't buy sheets."

"When you fold laundry, then," I put in, trying to defuse his frustration and make this feel educational, rather than critical. "The fitted sheet is the one that's really tricky to fold. The one that goes on the mattress when you make the bed."

He stares at me in complete befuddlement. "I don't do laundry. My mom makes my bed."

The other three of us, all women in our early thirties, just look at him. He's like a circus exhibit: The Amazing Twenty-Three Year Old Personal Trainer Incapable Of Basic Household Chores. A mythical beast we've heard tell of but, due to its amazing powers of camouflage, had never glimpsed in the wild.

The instructor breaks the silence. "You're the youngest child, aren't you?"

* * *

"Wait, it's illegal not to pick up your dog's poop?"

"Um, yeah?" I have not yet learned of The Boy's relative maturity level, and am truly confounded that he's grown up in Chicago without learning this.

"No way. What're they going to do, arrest you?"

"They can write you a ticket, charge you a fine," one classmate puts in in her accented English. "It's much less here than it is in Germany." I secretly hope that her obvious worldly experience will penetrate The Boy's thick skull.

"That's stupid. What's it hurting?"

"Rats eat it," the instructor says. "And they spread disease."

"Plus," I point out, "it's just kind of a dick move."

The Boy gives me a look, his face all scrunched up, disbelief and dismissal all rolled up into one toxic package. "Pshh. No, it's not. Who gives?"

While I am hardly a mind-reader, I can practically see the three of us - the instructor and my other two classmates - rapidly dialing back our expectations of The Boy's intelligence.

As for me, it's been a long time since I disliked someone as much and as instantaneously as I do The Boy in this moment.

* * *

I've been working hard on becoming a less judgmental and more compassionate person. It's been a long road, but in many ways, I feel like I've made real progress.

People like The Boy, though, who are charming and well-presented but lack even very basic awareness of the other people they share a planet with, twig me on a deep and fundamental level. And, as usually happens when something presses my buttons, I've been giving a lot of thought as to why.

Some of it is abstract, and comes from my sense of social justice. In much the same way we envision abusive spouses being horrible monsters, we tend to assume that the most harmful examples of racism/sexism/discourtesy/environmental pollution all come from people who're intentionally horrible and awful, who lack conscience. But while monstrous spouses and obviously-psychopathic society members both exist, they're far from common; mostly, the people around them will realize their antisocial tendencies and cut them off, from marriage or from society. Those who do the most harm, I'd argue, are the those who, through their aggressive ignorance and obstinate refusal to recognize that their actions affect other people as well as themselves, perpetuate (and, in some cases, create) systems that benefit themselves even as they structurally disenfranchise others. No one calls them out on it, because they seem so nice; they're not malicious, they're just unaware. And yet these people depend on that indulgence, that unwillingness to break the unspoken "confrontation is impolite" rule, in order to maintain their illusions that the world is there solely for their use.

And then, of course, there's the personal side. Among my father's many faults, one of his largest and most fundamental was a refusal to move past his self-centered viewpoint. He wanted his family around when he wanted them, and the rest of the time, he wanted to be left alone; he truly and honestly didn't understand why his wife and children didn't consider this an acceptable situation. Just as he truly and honestly doesn't understand (despite my explaining it to him in the most neutral and thorough language I could) why I don't want him as part of my life; it must be an irrational personal dislike, one of those things you're helpless against, mustn't it? It can't be his fault that neither of his children want much to do with him.

And a lot of it, ultimately, is even more personal than that: that I, myself, am a privileged person in many respects, and had it not been for a cadre of adults who were careful to emphasize to me the importance of considering others' viewpoints and their right to enjoy the world on the same terms as me, I might also have ended up using "Social Justice Warrior" as a perjorative term and wondering why everyone seemed out to get me just for existing. There's no personal pet peeve so strong as the "I've gotten past that point, so why can't you?"

All of that has made for a frustrating stew of emotions when dealing with The Boy. But I've been working hard to overcome them, to not let them color my interactions with him. Because, ultimately, The Boy is still young. If I let my judgment of him curdle now, if I tell myself that he's a lost cause and treat him as such in our interactions, then it will rapidly become a self-fulfilling prophecy. After all, no one wants to listen to someone who condescends to them, even if the other person has every objective justification to do so.

But if I can find it in myself to be compassionate, to recognize that he's a human being with a difficult road ahead (all the more difficult for how relatively over-easy it's been for him up to this point, in fact), and that he's doing the best he can with what he's got, just as all of us are...he's more likely to listen to what I have to say. To observe what I (and our other classmates) do, and (hopefully) why. It's not guaranteed, of course, but it's guaranteed not to happen if I don't treat him well.

I knew all of this in the abstract, of course. But what really drove it home was seeing him interact with our ethics instructor. Said instructor is fantastic - warm and caring and compassionate and wholehearted in his interactions in the best way. And watching he and The Boy interact has been eye-opening: The Boy stops turtling his neck, stops deflecting conversation, starts truly participating and thinking for himself, even starts examining his reasoning. He responds to the instructor's genuine interest in him.

It makes me feel ashamed. I know what it's like to be judged and found wanting; I know firsthand the frustration of trying to please someone who's already determined that they will never like you. I am intimately familiar with the mindset behind that dismissive scrunching of the face; that certainty that these people will never accept you, so forget them.

But I'll be damned if reserving judgment isn't a whole lot harder than it feels like it should be.