Enough With Fake People

"My concern is how we learn to be genuine human beings." - Lloyd Alexander

This week was our open house at the high school. I was really looking forward to the event, hoping to make some decisions on classes that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take and take a look at various extracurriculars. I was looking forward to learning what high school looks like and figuring out how I can best prepare for that. The night began with a meeting in the auditorium. This was the part where I expected to hear all the good high school advice that they had in store for us. Instead, it felt like propaganda straight out of a regime headed by the likes of Hitler, Stalin and Un (I don’t mean any disrespect in any way - these were terrible tragedies in the history of our world and I know that high school is in no way comparable - I’m just trying to draw a point.).

Three formers students got on the stage and, oh bless their hearts, yacked and yacked and yacked. “High school is where all your dreams can come true,” and, “Get involved in extracurriculars and your life will be filled with health, sunshine, and love,” or, “Once a Sequoit, always a Sequoit!” I couldn’t take it because it was so redundant and so little information was actually being exchanged: just meaningless stuff about school pride and everything is going to be great. I wanted to figure out things about classes and hear the pros and cons of different things.

So finally FINALLY the yapping ends and I get to go out and talk to people, with a vague hope hanging on a thread that they might have something useful to say. I wanted to talk to the department chair of science because I’d been recommended for AP Physics 1, and I didn’t know about taking two college courses freshman year, especially when science isn’t my natural strength and I have no intention of going into it any day. So I asked him about it and he didn’t hide anything. He was super blunt. “It’s going to be hard. There’s going to be days when you are having a meltdown and want to tear your hair out. You will be challenged. But that’s a good thing and we want you to get comfortable with that.” He told me straight up that there’d be tons of group work and it would be set up like the real class in college. But he also said, so what if you get a one on the AP exam. (which has a 40% passing rate!) You’ll be ready to take AP Physics C as a senior and then, come college, if I want to major in say, English, the Physics credits are either off my plate because I got even a three on the AP exam, or at least I gained a valuable experience from trying my best and getting challenged. (Knowing also that an AP B or even C looks a lot better to colleges than an easy A that I might have in Physics Honors) He told me every detail about the class, the good and the bad, and he answered my questions without sugar coating a single thing.

If he had said to me: “It’s going to be great, I see here you are really good at math, everything should be sunshine and unicorns,” I would have walked out feeling more than confident that I wouldn’t take the class and needed to do some research. Instead, because he told it like it was, I’m almost certainly going to take AP Physics 1 next year. (Thinking also about Ken Robbinson and his fantastic TED talks about schools killing creativity and “we are raised to think that failing is the worst thing that you can do.”) My point? Real people are seldom found in this world. People who can be real and honest with other people, on various different levels, will always mean the most to me.

I want to jump into reasons why people can’t be real, but before I do that I want to say a word about what real people look like. We need to have a definition.

Being real does not mean that you are so brutally honest with everyone that people you meet on the streets have to know the deepest details of your family life. It does, however, mean that you are generally inclined to be open, not naive, but open with who you are, how you are feeling, why you are feeling that way, what you believe and why you believe it - the things that make you, you. It’s not a sermon about being yourself. I will almost never write that quote essay because it’s so twisted by society already that you don’t need to hear it from me. People who are real are able to communicate their lives with others. There’s no doubting in relationships about how people really feel, there’s just general trust. Real people inspire other people to be real. The truth is always on the table and it’s not uncomfortable. It’s just there. That’s who relationships are built with people. For your best friends being real looks different than with someone you just met. Obviously, you are more transparent with those you are closest to and you can do that however you feel comfortable doing it. But people who are real build relationships, don’t spend time wondering, and don’t really care what other people they think. They don’t suppress emotions because they aren’t so carried up in daily life to think about them.

It sounds great Braxton, but obviously, that’s not where we are as a society. Why? Well, here’s some things and also some remedies.

We aren’t real with each other because we are taught that offending someone is the worst thing that you can do. It’s hard to be brutally honest when you are forced to consider everyone’s feelings before making a simple statement about your day or your view on a political fact. We shouldn’t be out to offend people and we should avoid doing so when we can, but we can’t be so concerned with what someone thinks or how they feel that we are hiding how we feel and our own opinions. Life isn’t a popularity contest. Being real will repulse some or even most people because it means being offensive, but it almost certainly will win the right people and build the right friendships.

We aren’t real with each other because it is expedient for us to do so. It’s hard to be real. It takes time to talk to people, to focus on relationships and most of the time it’s easier to give a hackneyed answer to a hackneyed question like: “How’s life?” then to have a discussion. Being real takes time, it means dealing with emotions (We aren’t all touchy-feely, I’m not either so when I see emotions I don’t mean emotional. I mean we know how we feel and we’re okay with that and we aren’t suppressing that under the mantra of more work, more work, more work.) But purposeful lives focus on relationships and purposeful lives need to be real.

We aren’t real with each other because we aren’t real with ourselves. This is where the emotions come in. We are so carried away with the day to day and the just keep swimming of life that we completely forget our own emotions and we don’t know how we are feeling. That may sound stupid to you, but if you aren’t stopping to reflect, and I mean really reflect on life and tough situations now and again, you’re probably not fully in terms with how you feel and if you aren’t, then it’s hard to be real with others.

There’s a whole host of other reasons that I’m thinking of but they mostly fit under those three categories. I would just say that they make poor excuses. The reason why being real is imperative is that we are not built to be ruggedly individualistic. Yet as a society, we are. We need to focus on doing life together and doing that begins with being real, with just laying the message on the table as it is. Not covering it up. Not being rude but also being honest. About anything and everything, whether it be an AP class or how our day is going. That’s what I’m pushing for more of. More honesty. More reality. More real. More life done together.