How people influence our place and motivations.

If I am candid, I have had an incredibly difficult time writing this final installment of my Influencers blog series. I created an infuriatingly vague prompt when I chose the title, How People Influence our Place and Motivations. It is not that I have had writer’s block, quite the opposite actually. I have had so many people influence my life for both good and for ill, that I had no idea what to choose for this blog entry.

Pride, Spite, Deceit, Love and Devotion, Loathing, Compassion. There are so many visceral ways our relationships with others can affect the course of our lives. There are moments in time where I look back—with almost no effort at all—close my eyes and find myself back in the experience of the memory. Sometimes, the memory is lovely, and I would gladly relive it a million times. Other times, I wish I could forget them.

One of the lovely memories that springs to mind happened on a chilly winter evening away from home when I was in high school. Some friends from another school and I had gone to a conference in southern Minnesota. Much to our delight, the hotel had a pool. I was so nervous about swimming. My swimsuit was not particularly cute or fashionable, and one of the people on the trip was a boy I had been flirting back and forth with for months. Every insecurity that could possibly be in the mind of a sixteen-year-old girl around a boy she likes was whirling through my head. He was also one of my best friends outside of school, so my mind was calculating how I would get out of this situation without humiliating myself. I remember, at one point, our other friends had gone back to our rooms. We were alone for the first time on this trip. We talked and laughed and flirted. I eventually found myself in his arms in the pool, and we were spinning in the water. We spun and spun and spun, my heart was soaring. That moment in the water was everything to me. This was the first time I ever felt like someone thought I was beautiful or worthy of romantic interest.

Nearly a year after that, we did finally date for a couple of months. I was too self-conscious to be open with my family about my relationship, and we broke up three weeks before prom, but that is a story for another day. I decided to share that story because it happened eight years after the first time someone called me fat to my face. It took eight years to feel worthy of love, and like my body wasn’t a negative piece of me.

The first time someone called me fat was on the playground in third grade. I doubt the bully even remembers that it happened. That is the thing about trauma and bullying though, often something said in malice will fundamentally change the way you see the world around you, but for the abuser, it is just another sentence that leaves the mind as soon as they receive the reaction they crave. I doubt she remembers her passing eight-year-old snark, but I do. That is a life-long influence. I remember with perfect clarity laying in my dark bedroom, sobbing and begging my mother not to make me go back to school the next day. I am a person who has loved school from the very beginning, but the mean words from one little girl made me dread it. I remember choosing to wear nothing but sweatsuits to school for the next two years until my father outlawed my baggy fleece armor. I remember being “modest,” but it was not modesty brought on by my changing body; it was modesty to hide my “fatness.”

Only a handful of people have ever called me “fat,” and most of them have been internet trolls. I do not usually take it to heart. However, to this day, I hear the shrill voice of my third-grade bully. I hear her when I shop for jeans and ballgowns; I hear her when I buy shoes or sit at the Thanksgiving table. That memory always immerses me. I don’t look back on it with the wisdom of an adult woman who has worked through that trauma. I live that memory, and I hear it with the ears of an eight-year-old little girl.

It would take until that day in the pool with the boy I liked, eight years later, for me to feel okay about my body. Those two people will likely never meet, and yet they influenced me profoundly, but in completely opposite ways. That’s the thing, isn’t it? People and the words they speak have so much power. We want to believe the age-old nursery adage, “Words will never hurt me,” but we aren’t fooling ourselves. Words and actions both matter.

I know what people say about me. I always have. I know what my high school nemesis said in the hallways; I know what my freshman roommate thought of me at the time. I could hear the whispers from the mean girls on the other side of the classroom in Graduate School. I know what my employers thought about my work ethic and my desire to lead. I know what professors thought of me. I see the snide looks from across the table at high school reunions. I also see the smiles from the people I help and the familiarity of passing friendship from bodega workers when I walk through the door. I know, I see, I hear, but the thing is… every negative in one person’s eyes is a positive in another’s.

I will let you in on a little secret. Even though I had many friends in school, I still listen to Mean by Taylor Swift whenever I am about to cross into Polk County, Minnesota, or attend an alumni event for grad school. Part of me is ashamed to admit it, but the fact of the matter is, some of what motivates me is spite. I am not fuelled by exorbitant amounts of spite, but it does not change the fact that spite is in the equation of influences. Do not get me wrong, I absolutely wish the best for everyone I have ever met; I harbor minimal ill will. Still, part of me is propelled by the knowledge that I am achieving all my goals despite what people from my past said about me. Until COVID, I was living the life I always wanted without caveats, and I know that I will continue to thrive in a post-pandemic world.

I am also fuelled by pride. I have often said, “if everyone has a deadly sin, mine is Pride.” I work incredibly hard to be best at everything I do, and I am proud of my accomplishments. I am proud that I have “shown the haters,” and I am proud of my progress. I am not a very humble person. Pride, for me, is not just me being proud of myself. I strive and work hard so other people can be proud of me too. I want the women in my life who have sacrificed for me to be proud of me. I want my high school history teacher to share in the pride of my lecturing to thousands of people about our nation’s founding. I want my grandfather to be proud of me. I want my nieces to see that anything is possible. Pride and Pressure go hand-in-hand because my pride is not mine alone.

We are now 1300 words into this blog post and 5000 words into this series. I have written about growing up, communities, Pride and Spite, Loathing, Love and Devotion, and the choices we make. I could spend a million words on all the ways people influence our lives and motivations. I am going to end this blog series with my thoughts on lying and deceit. While it is not a happy subject to end on, it is also the largest force for change in my life.

I am a radically honest person, and I am fiercely loyal. I seldom lie and will defend those I love in private quarrels and public squares. I believe that broken promises and spilled secrets are grave betrayals, and as a result, I have been known to hold grudges. I have also been known to take the wrong side in a battle because I believed the lies of people I thought were allies. Lies are the one thing I cannot tolerate in any relationship, whether the deceit comes from a significant other, friend, or family member.

Every major social shift I have experienced has resulted from me believing the lies people told me. A friend of mine lied to me in seventh grade to hide her mistake, I took the wrong side, and by the time the truth came out, I lost some of my best friends. My homelife growing-up was an environment of deceit and betrayal. My college boyfriend lied to me—a lot. The reason I moved to Philadelphia alone in 2018 was the result of uncovering a lie and leaving. The reason I ended my engagement was that I realized I had been lying to myself.

Deceit influences us in so many ways. The worst part is we do not even know it is happening half of the time. When the deception is active, we are being moved and manipulated without our knowledge or consent. Then, if—or when—we uncover the deceit, we are moved, shifted, and influenced again. Influence through deception is the worst kind of influence. You can go to therapy. You can heal from trauma and move passed the bullies and the parental issues. Sometimes, we can even answer the real question, “Why am I like this?” We can heal from the lies that have already affected us, but then we have to make a choice. When do you trust again? Who is worthy of your trust? Will this person influence me and deceive me?

Maybe I am the fool. I often begin from a place of trust, even though so many people around me have lied. I know the number of times this deceit, manipulation, and uncovering cycle has influenced my life trajectory. I am wary of trusting, but I do not want past villains’ lies to influence my view of society. Maybe it should? If I let that happen, deceit will continue to influence my life without my consent, and I know I do not want that to happen.

So, how do people influence our outlook, place, and motivation? Well, in short, words and actions matter. Sometimes we are motivated by wanting to be “better than” or to prove ourselves. Sometimes escape is the motivation. Sometimes everything and everyone in your life until this moment is why you react the way you do.

In 2016, I moved to Philadelphia. I moved because I always wanted to escape my small town; I wanted to make my family proud. I wanted to show the bullies back home how great my life would be, and I was running away from issues I had with my high-school homelife.

When I moved back to Minnesota, it was because my boss closed down the theatre I was working at, I was out of money, my boyfriend wasn’t contributing to our cost of living, and my sister had just had brain surgery.

In 2018, I applied to graduate school a year earlier than I had planned and moved to Philadelphia alone. I did that because I uncovered a web of lies my boyfriend had been spinning for years. I was looking for a way out of my relationship, I missed my friends, and I hated Minnesota for all reasons I had left in the first place.

Now it is 2020, and I am back in Minnesota. I finally ended my bad relationship, I have a graduate degree, and somehow achieved every “Do by 25” goal I set for myself. I am in Minnesota because of the Pandemic. The pandemic was spread by people.

I have moved roughly 5,000 miles in the last five years. Each time was a choice that I made, but those choices were educated by people around me and their influences from my past, present, and future. I have been motivated and influenced in big and small ways from the day I was born. No one exists in a vacuum. We share this world, and every action you take influences someone. Sometimes in small ways, like choosing which direction the toilet paper belongs on the holder. Sometimes in significant ways, like making them feel seen and important for the first time. Pride, Spite, Love, Devotion, Loathing, Compassion, Deceit, all those things come down to Commonality.

People influence our lives because we are never alone. The ghosts from our past and the people waiting for us will always affect us. Words, actions, proximity, and relationships influence us whether we like it or not. Therapy, mindfulness, and processing our trauma becomes critical to understanding why we are the way we are because our pain rarely sprouts organically from ourselves. The Sticks and Stonesnursery rhyme is essential to hold on to because we want our children to stand strong against cruelty. I think maybe growing up is realizing the lyrics should read, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words and manipulation might hurt me too.”