One thing I’m slowly learning is how to stop holding people accountable for things you haven’t articulated. It’s the emotional equivalent of waiting for an answer to a question that you mumbled. It seems basic but it’s actually really easy to avoid ever doing. There is so much incentive for abuse.

It’s insidious. On the one hand, there is some vulnerability in having to explain honestly how something makes you feel. On the other, saying anything means they might stop and then you can’t hold it against them anymore. Comparing the two options for someone like me, it not even a question. Think about how often people turn down the chance to feel better than someone else. In my experience, it doesn’t happen very often.

So I’ve tried to use the Mirror Trick on a regular basis. It’s meant for married couples but the application is far reaching:

Before you approach your partner with a grievance, take a mental peek into the mirror. What aspect of yourself, what issues or ‘stuff,’ either past or present, are you bringing to the discussion about this problem? For example, if you don’t like the amount of time your partner spends with friends, ask yourself “what does his/her spending time away from me mean to me specifically?” It could be an issue of feeling inferior to them or unwanted, something that cuts beyond the core of “a man/woman needs to be home with his/her spouse.” If you can ‘look in the mirror first’ you can then approach your partner with the grievance in the form of your personal idiosyncrasy with the issue as opposed to simply pointing the finger. This will often decrease defensiveness and lead to a more productive outcome. Consider: “When you spend such a large amount of time with your friends, it taps into my fears that you don’t want to be with me. I feel inferior to them.” Compare this with: “I hate it when you’re with your friends so much. You need to be home more.”

When I run through the list of my grievances they almost all are rooted at some level in this problem. I’m holding someone to account for something they never knew they signed up for. Changing that variable is an instant release of tension. I’m no longer carrying the resentment and suddenly, they aren’t the “violator” anymore. And for the other cases where you can’t do anything about it? It’s still ok, I think, to hold people to your own internal standards. You just don’t get the right to bemad about it.

I read a review of Watchmen and it said something about how the premise might be dated because it was written during the height of the cold war. It struck me because as far as I know almost nobody really thinks of 1985 as the raging year of the cold war. Normally they think back to tit-for-tat hydrogen bomb testing, Vietnam, the Missile Crisis, or Khrushchev getting shut out of Disneyland.

So what does that mean? I think that eras and ages amount to exactly dick. They are rhetorical devices that writers and politicians use to manufacture significance. Think about it, at the same time Americans were supposedly consumed by the darkness that brought us Watchmen, groupies were blowing stagehands so they could ‘bang the broads in Poison’ and John Hughes was shooting The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller back to back.

When was the last time you got up and actually felt the cultural consciousness pulling you this way or that? The underlying variable (people) are basically unchanged between now and then and 500 years ago, but we have no problem casually referring to the Decade of Greed or the Roaring 20s or the ‘Panic’ of some year the market crashed. The fact of the matter is that we have no idea what we’re talking about. We’re just trying make ourselves seem more important, like maybe if we give that generation an ethos someone will be kind enough to return the favor and that will somehow undo the fact that you’re dead and none of it matters.