“When I was a student at Oxford, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were lecturing there, Lewis magnificently and Tolkien badly and inaudibly, and the climate of opinion was such that people explained Lewis’s children’s books by saying ‘It’s his Christianity, you know,’ as if the books were the symptom of some disease, while of Tolkien they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…
“I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid). I sat there obdurately despite all his mumbling and talking with his face pressed up to the blackboard, forcing him to go on expounding every week how you could start with a simple quest-narrative and, by gradually twitching elements as it went along, arrive at the complex and entirely different story of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale – a story that still contains the excitement of the quest-narrative that seeded it. What little I heard of all this was wholly fascinating.”
Psychology textbook diagrams never cease to amaze me
ok y’all this isn’t a psych textbook gaslighting you into thinking it’s normal and ok for your boss to yell at you, it’s specifically about understanding that other people’s treatment of you is usually more about them than you.
If your boss is pissy with you, it’s absolutely more healthy to understand that behavior as a reflection of his mental state rather than of your worth as an employee.
It’s not a psych textbook’s job to advise you how to improve your workplace or say what is/isn’t acceptable treatment by a boss. It’s an example of detaching your own self-worth from how other people treat you.
^^THIS!
In fact, if you let yourself think of other people’s treatment as a reflection on YOU more than it is on THEM, it can prevent you from getting things done.
ifesbob 