CHOOSE YOUR RULES
Why don’t we frankly say to children, "How do you do? Welcome to the human race! We’re playing a game and we’re playing by the following rules. We want to tell you what the rules are so that you know your way around, and when you understand what rules we’re playing by, when you get older, you may be able to invent better ones...”
- Alan Watts, Playing the Game of Life
How do you determine what is allowed? How do you come up with your rules?
Of course, there are the Big Rules — the laws of your state and country. Most people follow most of those, most of the time. But most of our day-to-day lives and choices are not determined by laws.
How you speak and engage with people, the actions you take, the ways you approach and interact with your fellow humans… all of these are determined by your own internal set of rules.
Some of these are situation specific. For example, you may be more quiet and soft spoken at a funeral, wearing simple, formal clothes. Other rule sets are not situation specific at all. In fact, you may be carrying them with you wherever you go.
As I emerged from my cloud of niceness and began to be bolder and authentic, I realized I had no idea how to behave. For most of my life my choices were based on what I thought other people wanted or would approve of. The topics I would share in conversations, the jokes I would make, even my clothes and hairstyle were all chosen to conform to what other people would want.
I’ve seen this again and again in clients recovering from excessive niceness. From years without use, they’ve lost touch with their own internal compass. The only determining factor for their rules was: Will someone have a negative response to this? If the answer could be a yes, then they would avoid that thing. They’ve spent years, or decades, orienting themselves to what other people think is “right.”
To make matters worse, the rulemaking process is cumulative. Each time we learn someone doesn’t like something, we add it to the list of never-do’s. To take a trivial example, let’s look at socks. When I was a little kid I didn’t give a second thought about my socks. Zero percent of my young childhood memories are of sock choices, preferences, or who wore what kinds of socks. And then I got to middle school.
On the first day of my new middle school, I instantly realized I had made a huge mistake. I had worn white knee-high socks with two red bands encircling the top. It was my standard attire. I don’t think I’d even chosen them myself. Perhaps my mom did, or they may have been a hand-me-down from my brother. I didn’t know and I didn’t care, because I didn’t have any rules about socks.
But from that day forward, I did have a rule because every single boy in my class had short white socks that only went up a few inches from their shoes. In an attempt to not stand out as some sort of mutant, I hastily pushed my giant knee-highs as far down as they could go. This created a strange thick puddle of red and white around the tops of my shoes. Fail.
So, from that day forward I learned your socks have to be short. As soon as possible, I enrolled my mom into a trip to the department store to get me some new socks so I could fit in. For years I wore that exact kind of sock, which got me all the way through high school. Then, when I was in college, I happened to be wearing short black socks with shorts. Gasp!
I’ll never forget when I learned the second rule about socks. I was standing in line with several friends at the Coachella music festival. It was early afternoon, and blisteringly hot. I could hear the band playing on the main stage and the distant thumping of the electronic music tent, which was always my primary destination.
Being in an upbeat, energized mood, I turned to two women in line next to us. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but it was a simple question asking their opinion on something trivial or silly. Instead of answering that question, however, one of the women instantly fired back, “Well it doesn’t matter what you do with those black socks on.”
My memory of the exact wording is fuzzy, but the emotional charge is not. Her tone was harsh and dismissive, and I felt rejected. I didn’t know I’d broken another rule, and I felt a wave of shame in that moment. Oh no! All this time, black socks are not allowed either?
Flash forward to this day, decades after the first incident, and I still have rules in my head about socks. If I’m wearing longer black socks with shorts in the summer time, and we meet up with friends, some part of my mind says, “I wonder if they think that looks ridiculous.”
Seem crazy? It is. Yet we’re all doing it. We’re all accumulating rule after rule about what’s ok. And each person that we get disapproval from adds to our list of rules until our band of acceptable behavior has narrowed down to the thinnest strip of bland nicery.