1:00PM
Sometimes I just have to take a breath and realize that not everyone understands the world in the way that I do.
I think I wrote about this before, but I’ll give a fresh take: sometimes I feel so frustrated, annoyed, and angry at the world when someone doesn’t understand something that I understand (or think I understand).
I was talking with my dad about the difference between wearing a surgical mask and wearing an N95 mask. From what they say, a surgical mask helps to stop viruses from going out, whereas an N95 mask helps to stop viruses from coming in. With that in mind, when someone wears a surgical (or cloth) mask in public, it is not about protecting that individual from getting infected by other people, it is more about protecting other people from getting infected by that individual. An N95 would be the opposite, helping to protect individuals from getting infected by others.
For me, after reading and listening to epidemiologists, this seems quite clear and yet, I was talking about how I believe few people in the US actually understand this difference. I default a lot to assuming that people just don’t understand things and instantly I’m transported back to high school, being the kid who understood chemistry and being very frustrated when I couldn’t explain it to my good friend. It seemed to simple to me, it almost felt as if I were bashing my head against the wall to try to get the point across, and that seemed to make it worse.
I almost always did well in school all the way through college. I started at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the department of electrical and computer engineering (ECE). At the time, it was ranked the #3 ECE program in the country, behind MIT and Stanford. I eventually switched to International Studies with a focus on Intercultural Communications, because I didn’t like engineering that much, not because I wasn’t doing well. In ECE, I was near the top of my class, almost all A’s.
I don’t say that to brag, I say it to illustrate how I seemed to learn things quickly. When others didn’t, especially when I had to rely on them, I would get so frustrated and still do today.
I try to pause, step back, and imagine how these people might be feeling. Maybe they’re frustrated they don’t understand. Maybe they feel embarrassed to admit that they don’t know what it means. Maybe they feel scared that their learning inability (in this realm) will hurt them in the future. Maybe they feel guilty for slowing the team down.
I think one of the things I do the most to hurt people is to condescend them. I think it’s one of the emotional attacks I do the most. I don’t mean to. Sometimes my brain just moves really quickly and I want to keep moving fast (the opposite of this morning) and when people don’t get it, it slows everything down.
While I try to get better at protecting myself from emotional attacks, I also want to get better at realizing in which ways I most often attack others. I don’t mean to hurt others with this but I do.
1:10PM
