I find that I like to hide from criticism

A quote from The Usual Suspects:

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

I am terrible at accepting criticism. It always makes me uncomfortable to see someone disappointed with me, probably because I like to see myself as flawless. I usually prefer to wade in the risk-free zone where I know I won’t make any mistakes. But I know it’s inevitable for other people to disagree with me if I want to carve out my own path to life, so I figured I should start getting used to being criticized and people being unhappy with me.

I took on my reluctance to accept criticism head on as I was sitting in a disability training session. The discussion was supposed to teach us to how to interact with people with disabilities. Even though I consider myself to be a somewhat compassionate human being, I pretty much have zero experience with people with disabilities, so I figured this would be a good learning experience in caring for others.

Knowing this would be a good opportunity to face my judgment of people who are different from me, I watched a video of how not to interact with people with disabilities, and I saw myself in those videos. Being patronizing, and convincing myself I was being polite, but really I was seeing people with disabilities as less than human. Coincidentally, I also started to notice how annoying the woman leading the discussion was. She was also ugly, she had bad breath, and in all likelihood she was the devil.

Of course, this made me realize how quickly I get defensive even when someone is indirectly criticizing me. When somebody is revealing a side of you that you don’t want to see, it’s easy to respond by just jumping on their back. Way easier to judge someone else than yourself, I suppose.

I think it’s necessary to allow yourself to be criticized, and expose yourself to that sort of brutally painful honesty. Without it, I would’ve just gone on judging people different than me as less than me. I will still do this, of course, but if I can get out of the denial zone where I convince myself that I am perfect, I can at least try to change.

from ken

Are you trying to change your life? I'd love to hear about it! ken.e.noguchi@gmail.com

photo by clagnut