Don’t Let the Spirit Crushers Get You Down
The spirit crushers are everywhere.
Sometimes they are your parents, sometimes teachers. Often they are your bosses. They can just as easily be friends or colleagues.
Spirit crushers are the ones who tell you why you can’t do what you dream of doing. That you can’t possibly succeed. That you should try, oh, learning to type when what you really want to learn is neuroscience.
Who knows what makes them tick. Self-loathing? Arrogance? A misguided sense of preparing you for the harshness of the real world?
Doesn’t matter. They always leave a mark.
My friend Alison is one of the smartest people I know. She crossed paths with a spirit crusher in her first college class. He was a teaching assistant in a humanities class at UC Berkeley. He graded the very first paper she wrote.
She doesn’t remember what grade she got.
But she will never forget his scrawl across the page, seared into her memory like a brand: “Your problem is you don’t know how to think.”
Her reaction?
“It was actually devastating,” she says. “I won’t ever forget it. I thought, why bother? I should just drop out of school.”
This is the season when students return in droves to school, and schools are often where spirit crushers reign.
I wish there were some sort of inoculation against them. But all you’ve got are your wits.
You may not be able to control the “helpful” impulses of the spirit crushers, but you can learn not to be ruined.
Six years ago, Jo Anne Tracy, single mother to a 6-year-old boy, was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz, dreaming of becoming a researcher. She earned money doing clerical work at the school’s “re-entry center,” which provided support to returning students.
Her spirit crusher was a man who worked as a counselor (!) at the school.
“One day, I went in very excitedly to tell him about a professor who had just told me I should apply for graduate school,” Tracy says. “He was shocked--just stunned--and he started an argument with me. He ranted and raved and finally said, ‘Let’s face it, Jo Anne, you’re just not graduate school material.’
“I felt devastated. . . . I knew I had to go out right away and find people to tell me more encouraging things or it would kill me.”
Five years ago, Jack Riley was a first-year student in a Ph.D. program. He was captivated with the idea of studying the Soviet Union.
Until he had a conversation with a man who he describes as a “shining beacon of all Russian research.” Riley was complaining to the man that he was having trouble compiling research for his dissertation prospectus.
“His response to me was, ‘You don’t know pain and suffering and you are never going to be a good Sovietologist because you have learned your Russian out of a book. And your people have not suffered enough.’ It was just a crushing blow,” Riley says. “To this day, I’m sure he has no idea how devastating and insulting his comments were.”
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Some of us are better than others at developing an internal voice that drowns out the roar of the spirit crushers.
Jo Anne Tracy made a beeline for people she knew would encourage her, and, next spring, when she is 35, she will receive her doctorate in neuroscience from USC.
Jack Riley, 30, found a sympathetic ear in another adviser, who offered him the opportunity to work on a project involving international drug policy. Riley, who completed his doctorate, hopes to publish a book--his first--on the international cocaine trade this year.
“I’m so happy with what I do now,” Riley says. “I should probably send that guy a thank-you note.” (I imagine Riley also finds no small consolation in the breakup of the Soviet Union.)
And my friend Alison finished college anyway--she graduated with honors and became a newspaper editor, arguably a profession that requires the ability to think.
The spirit crushers are always out there, always ready to pounce on your aspirations, to tell you why you aren’t good enough.
But they’re kind of like the bogyman. They only have power if you believe in them.
So don’t believe in them.
After all, they don’t believe in you.
