With some downtime to write (a cherished rarity these days), I wanted to create some continuity with my last column. Figuring readers might tire of more EVOC analogies, I’m choosing to instead riff on some Streetlight Manifesto lyrics, which I referenced (and linked, for the curious) when talking about how we are best off not waiting for rescue, but instead need to “catch ourselves.” The song those words are from were the first encore in a Streetlight show that I had the good fortune to attend recently, so today I’m going to improvise off some words from the song that opened their set, “Enormous.”
I’ll leave the words for you to ponder for a moment:
Why don’t you hold your head up high?
You got a lot on your plate, you got a lot on your mind
What does that mean to you? Does it resonate with something you would say to someone else? Or something you need to hear yourself?
Personally, I will tell you that I can answer yes to both of those questions. I’ll start with unpacking the first one.
When people visit me in my ombuds role, they come for a wide, wide variety of reasons. It can be anything from “I don’t like paying for parking” to “I just got a notice of contract termination.” But they have one thing in common: something is wrong. More often than not, visitors feel sadness and shame over that something that is wrong. Even more than getting the problem “solved,” they often first need some reassurance of their own worth. The first time I heard “Enormous,” those twenty-two words just jumped out at me, because they sum up so much of what I want to convey to a lot of the people who see me: they have a lot going on, and they are still in the fight, and that’s something to be proud of.
Let’s further unravel the words. We start with a question, “Why don’t you hold your head up high,” which is, to my mind, a presupposition. If you’ve taken part in my “Difficult Conversations” workshop, you might remember that a presupposition is a phrase whose deeper meaning is implicit, though not present in a literal word-for-word reading. For example, “A lot of supervisors wouldn’t let you clock in late” on its surface communicates only that more than 50 percent of supervisors would not permit a late clock-in. But the implicit meaning is this: “Clocking in late is wrong. You should be ashamed that you do it. But I am such a special supervisor that I let you do it. You should be beyond grateful for me.”
Anyway, the presupposition in the question is that there is no reason not to hold your head up high, and that in fact you should be holding your head up high. Asking this as a question rather than telling someone “You should hold your head up high” is much more effective just because most of us tend to push back when someone tells us what to do. Case in point: telling someone that they’re going the wrong way is met with resistance, even if they are going the wrong way. Second case in point: the Argent song with a similar refrain is stated as a command, rather than question. Does it hit you differently?
Asking someone why they don’t hold their head up, by contrast, leads to them thinking, “Yeah, why don’t I do that?” not “Why do you want me to do that?”
The second half of the quote, the two statements, at first might seem to be saying the same thing, but I think they are different. “You’ve got a lot on your plate” to me suggests someone with many responsibilities, while “you’ve got a lot on your mind” is about someone with many things to worry about. Those overlap quite a bit, but not completely. Think about your responsibilities: they weigh on you, and you might worry about them, but how many other things over which you have no control do you worry about as well?
Invariably, the people I see as ombuds have both many responsibilities and many worries. I don’t think that’s unique to my visitors at all: I feel fairly confident that just about everyone could truthfully say the same. I know I feel those words deeply at this moment. It is hard to convey (but still I try) the incredible catharsis of screaming those lines along with hundreds of others while hearing this song live, being forcefully jostled and forcefully jostling others in the pit. I had a sense of relief, but also validation: it is okay to feel overwhelmed, it is okay to feel beaten up, because you have a lot on both your plate and your mind. And looking at those around me (in between the shoving), I could feel that they, too, had a lot going on.
I often wonder, when someone comes to me to share their problems, whether telling them that others are in the same boat is validating or discouraging. I think it’s all in how it is said. For example, an employee who is upset about having to pay for parking on campus: saying, “Yeah, you’re the millionth person whose complained about that,” is probably going to make them feel that my presupposition is “get over it.” But saying, “You know what? You aren’t alone,” might help. One of the worst things about suffering a personal loss is when people trying to comfort you tell you about their own horrific losses, which actually makes you feel both devalued (what happened to you is no big deal, so why are you upset?) and sad that you live in such a cruel world where such terrible things happen to good people. But there is actual value in letting someone know that others have been in the terrible place they are now, and that there is a way through. Maybe knowing that others have felt a similar (though never identical) pain helps us bear it better, though it robs us of the feeling that we are suffering uniquely.
Anyway, if you’re feeling beat up by life (and who among us doesn’t feel that way at least occasionally?) you might find those lines as inspiring as I did. And if you are at UNLV and want to talk about anything at all, you know where I am. I look forward to talking about anything on your plate or your mind.
So until next time, expect the unexpected, stay informed, and I’ll stay informal.
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