What other people think
Feeding wildlife is a bad practice, but sometimes the wildlife seems to disagree. (Image by Eszter Miller)
At the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, Fiona Apple, at not quite twenty years old, accepted her award for Best New Artist with a speech that earned the criticism and derision of many.
“This world is bullshit,” she said, her choice of words bleeped by the censors. “You shouldn’t model your life about what you think that we think is cool and what we’re wearing and what we’re saying and everything. Go with yourself. Go with yourself.”
Barely out of high school herself, she was speaking directly to the impressionable, picked-on kid she had recently been. But to the American public, about to embrace the Monica Lewinsky misogyny of 1998 and the Britney Spears misogyny of 1999, Fiona Apple was, in her words, a “skinny rich bitch” — not the underdog, but right on top. Another pretty young woman with sexualized image. One of the popular girls, telling everyone else how they should be.
It was painfully ironic to Apple that the public perception of her was completely the opposite of who she saw herself to be, and that her message was construed as the opposite of what she meant to convey.
I have been there. This was, in part, my experience of being a teacher and administrator.
I started a school back in 2012 with the specific intent of creating a safe, affirming place for students. I wanted to help them to feel good about themselves as learners and as people. I wanted to help them to feel seen — to support them in academic and social challenges and the inevitable personal struggles of puberty and adolescence.
Most of the time, that’s what we were able to accomplish as a school community. But not always. The very fact of being a teacher meant that I triggered additional trauma for students who had suffered in previous school experiences. And in secret online places, students engaged in cruelty toward each other that I didn’t know about until they had already been irrevocably harmed.
And my message of self-compassion and self-empowerment was sometimes resisted and received as the opposite. For example, encouragement to students to get more sleep and take care of themselves might be dismissed as me not wanting to deal with cranky kids, and a suggestion to a student that we come back to a tricky problem later might be met with shame and resentment on the part of a student who then thought that I didn’t believe in her ability to do the work.
How frustrating, when all I wanted was to convey that I did care about them and I did believe in them. To advocate for self-care is to push back against the culture of constant work and overprogramming. To step away from a problem is to trust in your brain’s ability to keep working on it without you instead of slogging forward to the point of total discouragement. I meant to be humane and compassionate. Instead, I was perceived as dismissive and bureaucratic — the exact elements of school culture I sought to fight against in the first place.
Of course this isn’t how things were all the time! Not even most of the time. But there was nothing that I could do to push back against other people’s perceptions and assumptions when they were, in my view, off the mark. Trying to do that just made it worse.
I had no choice but to make peace with the fact that I cannot control or even influence how others see me. As my mother says, “What other people think of me is none of my business.” I just have to keep working to uphold the values I stand for. If I allow others’ opinions of me to hold me back or distract me from my mission, that’s my problem.
Twenty-five years later, both the sentiment Fiona Apple expressed and the way she expressed it is commonplace now that public figures have daily access to platforms with worldwide visibility. She could speak directly to her fans and rail every day against the tyranny of Hollywood and musical tastemakers.
But that would just make her more visible, not necessarily better understood. Perhaps there would just be more opportunities for her to be misconstrued. So she stays away from social media. In fact, she’s living the values she espoused from the stage so many years ago. She’s not modeling her life based on what anyone else thinks is cool. She’s decided to go with herself.
I get that. And yet, here I am writing. I am going to keep trying to get my point across. I’m going to keep making things and sharing them. There’s always the risk of criticism and ridicule. There’s always the risk of harming someone or making things worse for the people you’re trying to help. Hopefully, in the long run, the net influence of my life will be a positive one. That’s not up to me to decide, but I can decide what actions I want to take and what I want to focus on. For now, I will keep showing up and doing the work I believe in, not regardless of what other people think, but sometimes in spite of it.
