Crossing the Jordan (Part 4): A Personal, Reflective Post on Jordan Peterson’s First Rule…

In my last post, I discussed Jordan Peterson’s first rule in his book 12 Rules for Life: “Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.” In that chapter, he used the example of a lobster to make a rather obvious, but often over-looked point: life is full of challenges, and you are bound to find yourself on the short end of the stick from time to time—how you respond to those challenges and failures will determine what kind of person you end up becoming. As with animals like the lobster, the natural thing to do is to give up and become a defeated, subservient creature for the rest of your life. But the fact is, human beings, although intimately related to the natural world around them, are still nevertheless different in that we can choose how we respond—we can choose to overcome those natural tendencies to let those times of defeat determine our lives. We can choose instead to let those times of defeat, where our world seems to come crashing down around us, as opportunities to remake and transform ourselves into better people.

Now, that sounds all nice, but in reality, we all know that can be tough to do. In my own life, within a span of four years, I experienced the following: my wife got pregnant and got cancer at the same time, and we endured dealing with chemotherapy throughout the course the pregnancy; then there was caring for our newborn son for the next year while she was recovering; then she filed for divorce about a year after our son was born; then there was a long, drawn-out divorce for almost two years, during which time she refused to move out; and then, a little over a month after the divorce was finalized, that was when the young earth creationist headmaster at the school at which I worked informed me that I wasn’t going to be rehired after the school year—since I didn’t believe the universe was 6,000 years old, he felt that I wasn’t a good fit for the Worldview program I built, and that I was subverting the authority of Scripture: I was a wolf in sheep’s clothing who spoke with the voice of the serpent. I now find myself a part-time adjunct instructor at a local university, and a single parent of a slightly autistic child.

Reflection
I’m still trying to put the pieces of my life back together, but this post is not about all of that chaos. Rather, in this post I’m going to share some of the things I’ve realized as I’ve reflected on those things that have happened to me. One thing you should definitely do when you go through something like a divorce is take the time to reflect how you got to that point. As I looked back on my situation, one thing I realized was that even before we were married, there were some clear red flags in our relationship that I clearly saw, but simply chose to ignore. What was it in me that caused me to ignore such obvious warning signs? Where did that come from? Why did I make such a foolish choice?

One of the things that Peterson says in his chapter is that people who, for whatever reason, find themselves on the low rung of the ladder when it comes to social status—people who are not valued by their peers, for example—often suffer larger amounts of stress about their situation in life. Therefore, because they feel like they are doing all they can just to survive, they often jump at any chance for fleeting moments of happiness or pleasure. In other words, it is something like a voice in your head saying, “Well, I’m nothing really special, so maybe this is all I should expect for myself. Maybe this is the best I can get.”

Having said that, as I was trying to process the breakdown of my marriage, I found myself often going back to my time in junior high. Despite me growing up in a good, stable family, despite me having a number of close friends for most of my life, and despite being relatively successful academically, I have always had this inner feeling of isolation—I always felt that I never really fit in; if not an outcast, certainly an outsider. And, like I said, I think those feelings stemmed from my junior high years. The more I reflected on my life, the more I came to realize that a large part of my self-image was shaped by those very tough years.

Junior High
Now I have rather fond memories of my grade school years, but junior high was a whole other matter. My parents had put me into Kindergarten when I was four years old, and I didn’t turn five until November—so that meant I was always the youngest as well as the smallest kid in class. In grade school, that wasn’t much of a problem, but in junior high, while most other kids were getting their growth spurts and experiencing their first doses of those hormones of puberty, I remained pretty small.

I don’t know anyone who thinks back on junior high fondly—the fact is, kids, especially junior high animals, can be quite vicious. And it just so happened that in junior high, I often was the prey. Not surprisingly, most of my memories from junior high were not good at all. For example, I lived in a town called Carol Stream, and thus the baseball hats we had for summer baseball had a “CS” on them. I would wear my hat to school, and the “big kids” proceeded to give me the nickname “cocksucker.” They’d often knock my books out of my hands and essentially play soccer with them down the hallways.

One time a kid jumped me from behind as I walked home from school, got me down on the ground, and essentially boxed my ears in. Another time, while the boys were waiting in the locker room, waiting for the bell to ring after gym class, another kid and his two buddies grabbed my hat and threw it in the urinal. Being the strong-willed child that I was, I walked over, picked up my hat, came back to that kid and wiped it down the front of his shirt. He immediately shoved me up against the wall and was probably going to beat me up—but the P.E. teacher popped his head out of his office, and I was temporarily spared. Later that year, that kid and his two buddies found me at a local park, and for about 15 minutes they chased me around the park. Fortunately for me, I was in cross country, and they probably were already suffering from early stages of emphysema from all the cigarettes they smoked behind the public library, and they never were able to catch me.

Now the thing is, those experiences didn’t break me. Sure, I would go home and cry myself to sleep on more than a few nights. But the fact is, when I was at school and those kids would come after me, I never backed down. I always “stood up straight with my shoulders back.” I was determined not to let them intimidate me. That is something that is just part of my DNA—if I feel you are trying to bully me or have it out for me, I’m not going to lay down and take it. I am extremely resilient in that regard.

Comments
But what scarred me during those years were certain, seeming innocuous comments. One time after I stayed after class in Industrial Arts to help the teacher clean up, I remember him telling me, “You know, Joel, you’re really not as bad as the other kids say.” Wow. Try processing that comment when you are 11 years old. Was that teacher trying to hurt me? No. Did that comment shatter me? Absolutely. Another time, after I had just come in third at a cross-country meet—the kid who came in second elbowed me out in the last sprint to the finish-line—I remember complaining to my coach, “But that kid pushed me out of the way.” Mr. Ask responded with, “Well Joel, you just have to be the push-er, and not the push-ee.” Now, he was right—that’s what you need to do. But it highlighted to me something I couldn’t do—I was too small to push back enough to win.

But, as strange as it may sound, the most hurtful comment that I remember from junior high was a brief comment a girl wrote in my 7^th grade yearbook. In junior high, you get everyone to sign your yearbook—even kids you don’t really ever hang out with. In this case, it was one of the popular girls who hung out with the boys who often made my life miserable—I didn’t even particularly like her. Now, I can’t tell you what any other kid wrote in any of my three junior high year books, but I have always distinctly remembered what she wrote:

To Joel—a cute, little boy. –Beth. E.

That was it. That comment hurt me more than anything else that had endured in junior high, for it cut to the heart of my biggest insecurity. When I was picked on by the junior high boys, I could choose to stand my ground and fight back. Even if I got beat up, I could refuse to back down and hold on to my dignity. But that comment simply casually said, “You’re small, you’re little, you’re insignificant. You’re not worth…anything.”

It is truly strange the way life works—how things like your inner make-up and outward circumstances play off each other and intermingle to produce the person you eventually become. I look back at those physical confrontations from junior high with pride—they made me tougher. They made that strong-willed, independent kid Joel even stronger and determined to stand up for myself. But that brief, condescending comment in my yearbook had the effect of pushing that strong-willed, independent kid even more into myself. I was going to do the things I wanted to do and pursue the things I loved, but I was just going to accept the fact that no one—especially girls—would ever think much of me or give me the time of day. After all, I was always the little boy in my class; I was always smaller.

I simply accepted that definition of myself, and that mindset stayed with me throughout high school, college, and most of my adult life. In high school, I had a very good circle of friends in my grade, but they were all older. Most had gotten their driver’s licenses by sophomore year, whereas I had to wait until my junior year was half way over. The result was that they all started really dating a good year before I could. The result was that by the time I got my license, I was just too scared and intimidated to even try. And the handful of times I worked up enough courage to ask a girl to a school banquet, it was always a very polite rejection, and in my head, I simply heard, “No, you’re just a cute little boy.”

Here’s the Point
The point of this post isn’t to get anyone to feel sorry for me, but rather to show, on a very personal level, the truth in what Peterson is saying in his first rule of his book. “Standing up straight with your shoulders back” basically is the challenge to confront defeat, hurt, and disappointment in your life, and being courageous enough to remake yourself. It also warns you that if you don’t, that defeat and hurt will in a very real sense end up changing you for the worst—failure to confront that stuff will come back and bite you in some cases, and absolutely devour you in others.

For me, it was a handful of comments during my junior high years that not only fed into my own insecurities of always being too small and too young that I was never strong enough to really confront and overcome within myself that shaped—not my self-perception—but rather my perception of how I assumed people saw me. The result was that when I met someone who told me how great she thought I was, I chose to ignore the numerous red flags in the relationship that were telling a different story, because that insecure little boy inside me still was longing to be told by someone other than his parents that he was worth something. In time, those words stopped, though, and I felt the full brunt of actions that screamed I was worthless and proceeded to blow up my world.

I feel I am a whole lot wiser than I used to be. As hard as my recent experiences have been, they’ve been necessary to get me to reflect about my life and to finally confront the past insecurities that I tried to sweep under the carpet for much of my life. Hopefully, the person who comes out on the other side of all this will be just a little bit better.

In his book, Light Through Darkness, Orthodox writer John Chryssavgis quotes the desert father, Abba Alonius: ‘If I had not destroyed myself completely, I would not have been able to rebuild and reshape myself again.” This is actually very similar to what Peterson says when he says, “Every death is, simultaneously, a metamorphosis” (12).

The simple point is this: how we confront disappointment, defeat, and hurt—how we respond when we are faced with the death of a whole hosts of things in our life—is crucial to our becoming true human beings. And if you fail to confront a “little death” in your life, eventually that can grow into a destroyer of worlds, and then the challenge to confront it, to allow yourself to be crucified by it, and then be resurrected from it will just a whole lot harder.

But the reality is, there simply is no other way to get through to that new life—you must take hold of that chaos that disappoint and defeat brings, you must let it kill the part of you that needs to be put to death, and then you must have the courage to remake yourself into something better.