It is clear that Eeyore suffers from loneliness. This is not an unusual state of affairs for a pessimist. Eeyore’s most obvious problem is his belief that the other animals don’t like him. This is not, in fact, true. Even though Pooh and Piglet’s birthday presents don’t quite make it to Eeyore intact, and the sticks for the house they build for Eeyore come from his old house, they do mean well. The have gone out of their way to do something nice for Eeyore. And Eeyore is delighted with his birthday presents. Pessimists are people of simple pleasures. Sometimes just having a popped balloon and a pot to put it in is just fine. Eeyore even likes his new house.
Why then does he continue to believe that no one cares and no one likes him? When I was a kid we used to sing:
“Nobody likes me, everybody hates me,
Guess I’ll go eat worms.”
Actually, I didn’t sing it so much. It was my mother who sang it to me when I was being an Eeyore. She has always been a bright and optimistic person, so it has been hard on her to have an Eeyore in the family.
It is nor clear how Eeyore got that way. He is introduced to us already a full fledged pessimist. So I can only comment on how I got this way. With me its a phobia. An inordinate fear of humiliation and rejection. The operative word is “inordinate”. No one likes humiliation. No one likes rejection. But most people learn to deal with these as part of the aches and pains of life. For some of us, however, humiliation and rejection become major traumas.
In sixth grade, I spent three months at a strange school in Pasadena. Strange in more ways than one — this was back in the late 50’s during the California experiments in education. As I was walking home after school one afternoon, the cutest and most popular girl in the class called me over to look at my baseball mitt. She told me she wanted to see if it was like her brother’s new mitt. I was delighted that she paid any attention to me, for whatever reason, and went over to her panting like an expectant puppy. She didn’t look at the mitt. She just stamped on my foot as hard as she could and said that if I ever corrected her in class again she would kill me. I stood there unable to move while she ran off to her friends laughing and giggling. My foot hurt. But I soon got over that. The humiliation hurt much more. And I still struggle with that at times.
This kind of thing happens to us all. The difference is that most people are able to get over the humiliation as well as the sore foot. Those of us who aren’t have a harder time. We become pessimists. We make friends very carefully and very slowly. And we seldom let ourselves believe that people really like us. We only really open up to a few close and trusted friends. We are always on our guard against any situation that could possibly expose us to humiliation or rejection.
One escape is playing the buffoon. Putting yourself down before anybody else gets the chance. Stumble and bumble. People laugh at you, but you know this is not the real you. “I’m getting too old to program”, is what I used to tell them at work. Even though I was the best programmer in the place. At the job before, I used to entertain the group with my misadventures building our house. They were amazed when we finally finished it and invited them out for dinner to a wonderful house, designed and mostly built by my wife and myself. My stories of misadventure as a do-it-yourself car mechanic, however, were all too true.
There is a more positive side to all of this. Not liking crowds is a perfectly acceptable choice. Having a few good friends rather than a large group of acquaintances is also a perfectly reasonable approach to life. Not everyone is a social butterfly. Nor should everyone be. Eeyore said it best:
“Nothing, Pooh Bear, nothing. We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is too it.”
“Can’t all what? said Pooh, rubbing his nose.”
“Gaiety, Song-and-dance. Here we go round the mulberry bush”
“Oh!” said Pooh. He thought for a long time and then asked “What mulberry bush is that?”
“Bon-hommy,” went on Eeyore gloomily. “French word meaning bonhommy,” he explained. “I’m not complaining, but There It Is.”
Being alone can be quite nice. Gives you a chance to think about things. To ponder about “why and wherefore”. To enjoy the sunshine and the forest. Eeyore was just ahead of his time. Today we know that “bogs” are really “wet lands” that should be prized, enjoyed, and preserved.
The problem is not being alone, but being lonely. Not having company when you want it. Here again we have to be careful not to impose a single standard on everybody. Almost everyone needs companionship. But different people need different amounts. Someone who stays in for several days knitting in her bedroom may be perfectly happy. You don’t necessarily have to go in and drag her to the Mall. In many cases those you may feel inclined to diagnose as lonely simply need less company than you do. Some very productive people who make major contributions to life are loners. It’s an OK thing to be.
But lonely isn’t OK. For the lonely, the only advice I have goes back to another incident from my youth. I was a little older this time, 16 or 17. Our neighbors had a pool and I was trying to learn to dive. I not only share Eeyore’s pessimism, but also his athletic prowess. So arms and legs were flying everywhere. I was trying to learn to do a half gainer, which means you jump off the board forwards and arch back into the water backwards. A beautiful dive — if it’s done right. But I was too chicken to really try it. Finally, I went for it. Splat. I did a perfect quarter gainer, which means you jump off the board forward, arch back into the water, and land flat on your back. Not a pretty dive — and painful. But it freed me to go on to learn some other dives. I never did learn to do a decent half gainer, but I did manage a full gainer. The secret was that after I landed flat on my back, I said to myself, “That’s the worst it can get”. So I wasn’t so afraid anymore. (Nor very smart — As anyone who has ever done gainers knows, it can get a lot worse. You can hit your head on the board).
Humiliation and rejection hurt. Like landing on my back hurt. They hurt a lot. But you can get over them. You can pick yourself up, dry yourself off (I know this isn’t the normal metaphor, but I got started with this diving thing), and try it again.
One thing that often gets in the way of positive and fulfilling relationships with other people is our level of expectations. Sometimes we expect too little, and sometimes we expect too much. In either case, we have a tendency to pre-judge people. When my sister and I were just starting in school one of our neighbors was a gruff old man. We were scared to death of him and made up stories about the awful things he did to little boys and girls. Then one day when we were playing on the sidewalk in front of our house, one of the wheels came off our wagon. The mean old neighbor happened by and stopped to see what was wrong. He went to his garage, got some tools, and put the wheel back on the wagon. But more importantly, he talked with us for a while. It turned out he was really nice and had not eaten a little kid in his whole life.
Sometimes we are really good at making up stories about the people around us. Often for no more reason than that they are old or young, or black or white, or Jewish or Mormon, or they wear clothes that are too old or too fancy. Like my young son used to say about the people on the “other” channel when we lived in Canada, maybe they just speak spinach. Any excuse is good enough to make someone the target of our projections.
But they are still just our projections. Our prejudices. It is all too easy for a pessimist, somewhat lonely and withdrawn, to imagine all sorts of terrible, or just annoying, things about other people. You have to admit, Pooh and Piglet, at first glance, don’t appear to be prime candidates for lasting friendships. They won’t ever become vice presidents, won’t ever be elected to the Academy of Sciences, won’t ever win the local tennis championship, won’t ever make the society page. It would have been easy for Eeyore to dismiss them as silly, bumbling, and useless. Often friends come from unexpected places.
I decided at one time to draw the line at people who play golf. This was after I had sworn off golf myself after a brief addiction. Although this rule was threatening to end some close and satisfying friendships, I was still clinging to it, when the unthinkable happened. My father took up golf. Not only took it up, but became an immediate addict. He even sucked my mother into it. Now it might not seem too unusual for a man in his fifties to suddenly take up golf, but I wouldn’t have been more surprised if my mother had taken up belly dancing. He wasn’t really a golf sort of person. He ran wild rivers and packed horses into the deep wilderness. He was on the ski patrol almost before the ski patrol had ever been invented. He built houses and churches and barns, all in his spare time. He developed abstract theoretical models of the physics of the solar atmosphere, did complicated integrals on the grocery bags while I was getting my hair cut, and traveled to remote corners of the world to solar eclipses and scientific conferences. He would never take up golf. Shows you what I know.
The problem is in the phrase “golf sort of person”. You can replace “golf” with anything and the problem remains. Most of our generalizations about this sort or that sort of person are hopelessly unfounded. They are simply prejudices with no foundation in fact. People are complex, multi-dimensional beings. There is often very little correlation between these dimensions. And even if there are statistical correlations, like say between cowboys and not liking ballet, there are still lots of exceptions. Enough to sell out the Bolshoi in Laramie Wyoming.
The bottom line, of course, is that you have to get to know the person as an individual. You can’t simply assign them to a class and assume that they will have all of the attributes of the class. As a class small squeaky pigs are not exactly appealing. Yet Piglet turned out to be a good friend to Eeyore. Eeyore could well have said to himself, “I’m not going to have anything to do with him, he’s a runt pig!”, and missed a very good friend who brought him popped balloons and pansies.
Prejudice can work in both directions. Some people fit into our “good” categories in some respects and so we assume that they will be good people and good friends. They might drive the right car, have the right occupation, go to the right church, like the right sports, and still turn out to have very little in common with us at the fundamental human, or stuffed animal, levels. Superficial matches make poor friends. A positive prejudice is still a prejudice. It is a judgment based on an unjustified generalization. Based on no real evidence.
The worst positive prejudice is popularity. Of course, you should not reject someone because they are popular, but you should not attempt to build a friendship on this basis.
Eeyore types are like the Marines, we are looking for a few good friends. Not everyone will do. Sometimes it is best just to avoid the self-centered, self-important, and pompous altogether. But you have to find out about a person, or an animal, first, before you can decide. Tigger is a good case in point. Not that he is likely to be a best buddy, but beneath all the bounce and bravado, he is really OK. He’s just Tigger.
Friends aren’t perfect. We all have faults. Sometimes they make mistakes, and bounce you into the river, getting you very wet indeed. But if you are a real friend you can’t de-bounce Tigger. Or if your middle-aged buddy starts dying his hair, you can’t just dump him. There are worse things in the world than an over-active bounce or orange hair on a fifty year old man. You have to stick by friends and hope they stick by you.
For some of us, the hard part of being a friend is not so much accepting the friend as he is, but accepting ourselves as we are. Pessimists are not big on positive self-images. We tend to be a little weak in this department. Actually, many of us have the problem illustrated in the old joke “I would not want to be friends with anyone who would have a friend like me”. On the one hand we have delusions of grandeur. We are diamonds, usually in the rough. Prodigious talents, usually undiscovered. Brilliant minds, usually unrecognized. In this mode we are far too grand to associate with Pooh Bears and Piglets. But on the other hand, we are plagued by anxieties. Maybe I won’t measure up. Maybe I won’t be able to do it. The old fears of humiliation and rejection. In this mode, Owl and Rabbit may seem like real threats, so we had better just stay home in the bog.
Both images are probably wrong. We are probably not as grand as we suppose in our inflated moments and probably not as bad as we fear in our anxieties. Facing the real truth about ourselves is one of the hardest things we can do. And the most liberating. No one is very fond of people who pretend to be something they aren’t. And since we Eeyore types are not very good at pretending, it never works for us. But people might actually like us if we would just relax and be ourselves.
I must admit that I am not really very good at this friendship business. But my wife is. She has lots of very good friends. Every once in a while, when she gets fed up with my solitary ways, she patiently explains to me that the most important part of having friends is being a friend. She is the ideal example. Always doing things for people. Baking bread for the neighbors, taking a special treat to someone who is having a hard time, calling them on the phone and just talking. It seems that this business of having friends not only involves the risk of humiliation and rejection, but also a lot of hard work.
But it is worth both the risk and the effort. For pessimists as for anyone else, the only real meaning and worth in our lives come from the relationships we have with other people and the contributions we make to those around us. Very few people when they come to die think back on their 65 Mustang, their last promotion, or the new tile in the bathroom. It is our family and friends that give meaning to our lives. My old boss said of his father that he collected friends like some people collect stamps. In this life, and the next, friends are infinitely more valuable than stamps. So its time to get out of the bog a little more often and try a little harder to be a good friend.
But watch out for that little girl in the playground.
Recent Comments