pick your fights

Tags

conflict, self-defense, self-preservation

“you have to grow a thicker skin!”

yeah right. from what? i am not G-d so i can create from nothing.  i live without a skin. so how can i grow a thicker skin? truth is i cannot. i can only train myself to recognize the people and situations that will cause me to be hurt and bleed. i can learn to pick my fights. i can learn when it is futile to argue my point and withdraw gracefully before i get hurt.

people who use logical fallacies such as ad hominem are really not worth spending time on. people who keep arguing in circles or throw about straw men are not going to suddenly ‘see the light’ however much you argue with them. stay away from them.

fanatics of any stripe – let them go, they have no interest in being educated. really.

expose their fallacies, their fanaticism, if you must and then withdraw from the discussion. nothing can be gained from interacting with such people, except obsessive thinking, loss of focus, loss of self-esteem and good faith. really.

do not listen to those who say that if you leave a discussion or a forum or a friendship you let the ‘bad’ guys win. they are wrong. the bad guys win if you lose focus, self-esteem and good faith and end up obsessing about them and how wrong they are – that is what they want. and you will if you engage them. take my word for it.

pick your fights. and for us with ADHD and Asperger’s the fight is to stay away from situations that hurt us, make us obsess, and feel bad about ourselves.

strength and weakness

Tags

Hitchens, Nietzsche, strength, weakness, Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared, “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Christopher Hitchens

i am not sure exactly what Christopher Hitchens actually concludes about Nietzsche’s famous saying.

i know that i disagree with Nietzsche.

the saying lands up there with “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me.” what does not kill me makes me bitter, cynical, resentful, sad, depressed, loathe of people – unless i find some way to deal with the pain and suffering. ‘stronger’ for the most part means ‘having created a shell around oneself as protection against pain’. people who claim that they are not hurt by what others say to them, however vicious are lying to you and to themselves. they have adopted an attitude of arrogance, a brave face behind which they are smarting from the stings of insults and put-downs just as much as you and me. however, they are too weak to admit to the imagined ‘weakness’ of feeling hurt and harmed, and therefore declare their ‘strength’. their ‘strength’ is just a pretense.

words do hurt. hurtful words delivered with physical violence are doubly hurtful and harmful. they kill the soul. not as quickly and cleanly as drunk driver or an armed robber might. they kill slowly, insidiously and horribly. it works like the poison hemlock Socrates was sentenced to drink.

as we are ‘raised’ on the idea of  “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me.”  and “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” we are raised to deny  and feel bad about being hurt by what others say. so we sign our own emotional and spiritual death-warrants and cover ourselves in layer upon layers of imagined strength that is nothing but window-dressing for a bleeding heart and soul, slowly growing cold and rigid.