I don’t know what to say.
Sometimes I get the feeling that I have to say something, but nothing comes to me. Right now, I know that I’m supposed to write something, and not just anything, but I put pressure on myself to write something witty or something profound. And yet my body says, “Dude, you just woke up, it rained all night, it’s cold and dark outside, you know you really just want to sleeeeeeeeeeep.”
But I told myself I would write something.
I think this happens a lot to leaders in groups. Everyone looks at the leader expecting them to say something, especially in times of crisis, and if the leader has nothing to say, often they’ll still say something anyway, forcing it out, saying what they think they’re supposed to say instead of what they want to say.
In a way, I feel grateful that I’m writing this book in the way I am—giving myself the flexibility to say what I want to say, not having to conform to very specific predetermined topics.
At what point do we force ourselves not only to say something that we’re not feeling, but do something we’re not feeling because of the expectations we think people are placing on us. How often do we say yes when we really want to say no, but don’t have the courage to tell everyone that? Vice versa, how often do we say no when we really want to say yes?
As much as I like to believe that I’m an independent human being choosing to do exactly what I want, I’m not—I’m a human, just like everyone else, who succumbs to social pressures. I care about how people are feeling often more than I care about how I’m feeling and will do things to accommodate to their expectations. This aspect came up in a conversation with a friend the other day about whether we all should be forced to be in quarantine. I told him that right now the social pressure (and law) says we should stay at home, and I agree that it may be a little too strict, but I worry that if it were the opposite, where the governor says we can go back to work, that the social pressure will also flip. The person who is afraid to go out into society because of a vulnerability, right now, is socially pressured to stay home, but if companies opened, may be socially pressured to go to work, losing their job if they don’t go out of the house. As someone with a mother going through chemotherapy right now, if I had a full-time job at a company, I may not go just because I don’t want to risk contracting COVID-19 and spreading it to my mom. But how difficult that decision may be, whereas it seems much easier to make now that society has, more or less, agreed that we should stay home.
Again, I think this comes down to the challenge of being a leader—saying what we want or don’t want to say, no matter how much people are pressuring us to do something else. I find it hard to do in just a family setting, can’t imagine what it’s like to do in front of millions or billions of people.
