Feedback

My belief is that people are basically good. They stopped when I had a car accident in grad school to make sure I was OK – calmly patting my arm and assuring me the dust was from the airbag and not smoke from a fire, reaching past me to engage the emergency brake when I was too weak and shaky to do it myself, lending support so I could hobble across the street on my sprained ankle. Perhaps some of our species drive while intoxicated or distracted and lose control, smashing into some innocent vehicle on its way home. But I can’t truly fathom the idea of someone choosing to turn the wheel into oncoming traffic – to engage in purposefully harmful behavior without comprehensible motivation. I don’t get it. And so I’ve always assumed I’ve done something to trigger – at least in some way – an attack.

“That smells like accident,” I said sadly as Friend and I moved slowly past a cluster of cars toward my house last night.

“It must have just happened,” she noted, peering across me at the people beginning to exit their own cars to check on the Jeep that was smashed and facing the wrong direction. “I didn’t see any other damage – perhaps she hit the guardrail and spun around? Though if she did hit the semi that was stopped up ahead, we wouldn’t be able to see the damage.” I nodded at Friend's thoughts as we picked up speed, rather pleased we were too late to have seen it and comforted by the fact that at least 5 cars had turned on their emergency lights and formed a barrier between the victim and interstate traffic.

“I’d call 911,” Friend said, “but I saw people with their cell phones out so I’m sure they’re taking care of it.” Thinking the southerners were a helpful bunch, I nodded, but never considered that the line of cars and trucks, yellow lights blinking warningly, had arranged themselves around the broken SUV to prevent someone from taking aim at the driver and running her over. Given the opportunity, people avoid doing each other harm, I thought.

But that’s not always true.

I’ve been thinking over the past couple of weeks about feedback. There’s no shortage of opportunities for people to tell students or post-docs or even faculty members that we’re not doing as well as we should. The paper isn’t written properly – I don’t see the significance. The experiment is OK, I guess, but I would have done something else. Try something else and we’ll talk again! Not funded. The hiring committee decided to go a different way. You can’t defend until you fix your dissertation. Or get three papers. No, two papers. Well, let us decide on the details and then we’ll let you know.

Given that the story of my defense could be used by grad students who get jerked around or criticized unfairly, who are presented with feedback incongruent with their perception of reality, who stare across desks at professors they liked and trusted, now wondering what had shifted and made these people so awful – I feel like I should offer something more about how I handle these situations. I choose to believe that Chris is right when he commented – I have won. I packed my diploma awarding me a Doctor of Philosophy the other day. I’ve created a rather impressive CV and published and collaborated over the past three years. I was offered a job I badly wanted and will continue to use my years of training to be quite good at said job. So I’ve collected a couple stories about my reaction to bad feedback and thought I’d share (in a rather lengthy post - brace yourselves.)

Wait.
Friend once asked if I could do a quantification of hatred post. Where drivers who go slowly in the left lane ranked next to people who wouldn’t turn left despite many opportunities. If showing your disdain for the audience by preparing a seminar so poorly that you flipped through 30 slides, saying “Well, we don’t have time for that!” was rated a 7, was starting part seventeen of your talk when you’re already 20 minutes over your allotted time an 8 or 9?

It turns out I couldn’t do it. I made a graph to help explain. We have four situations to consider – two positive and two infuriating.

Compliment on my shoes – Perhaps someone tells me I’m adorable with my flip flops and how they match my shirt. Or I’m wearing my brown flats and the woman taking my blood at the blood drive says, “Look at the pretty bows on your toes!” I like this.

“I’m proud of you.” – I had gone in to see if Boss had finished with the two papers I’d given him several weeks ago. He had not. So we chatted about how he was traveling more than normal, I told him to make sure he took care of himself and turned to leave. He called my name when I was almost to the door and I glanced over my shoulder. He told me he was proud of me and I smiled and thought that was very sweet.

Bad Talk – If I’m giving you an hour of my life, teach me something. Don’t mumble, write clear slides, act like you have some clue of what you’re talking about and respect that 100 of us came to sit through this atrocity.

Awful Drivers – Seriously, people. You’re killing me. There are rules. If we follow them, you’re far more likely to stay out of my way.

Now. If you consult this figure, you’ll notice there are three numbered areas. I therefore have three points.

1. My moods vary. The figure is probably generously conservative since I likely get in the car or walk into a seminar room between a -6 and 6 depending on what’s happened earlier. But let’s pretend I’m somewhat stable and am just slightly off center. So I establish some baseline and then the arrow indicates some event that happens as defined by the legend.
2. Uh oh. Something has thrilled or enraged me. The feeling – bad or good – is going to be intense. I’m either cooing or cursing, melting into a sweet smile or gritting my teeth.
3. OK, now I’m relaxing into whatever it is and the emotional intensity lessens. Sometimes this takes days, often it takes moments. I can, of course, retrigger the peak intensity if I think too hard about it or write about the situation on my blog. But, should no other stimulus arrive, I even out a bit. The caveat is that you’ve altered by baseline mood. I am now better or worse than I started. And this is why the next event could be handled better or worse than one that happened earlier.
   

So quantifying these things is hard. They happen, I react very strongly and then I calm down. Since I’m ever so slightly introspective, I know this about myself and try desperately to allow time before I respond. I’m either swamped with love and desperately want to please someone in return or stomping my feet in a tantrum and unlikely to do much other than spew profanity and insults at someone.

Obsess.
So let’s imagine a feedback scenario, shall we? One Sunday night, just after writing a rather innocuous post about flowers and random weekend happenings, I received a comment.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Pajamas & Papers (& Pictures!)":

Wow. You are just as lame and lifeless as when I last wasted time looking at this blog. Congrats on being almost 30 and just as psychologically stable as a 12 year old girl on crack.

Cheers.

Posted by Anonymous to Minor Revisions at 8:23 PM

You would not have noticed this comment because within my peak emotional intensity, I deleted it. (I know this contradicts the entire point I just made about waiting. But! My blog is a place primarily for me and I don’t like mean comments.) So I treated those words like a spikey weed and removed them from the page. Then I blinked back tears and rubbed at the ache in my chest and very sadly told Friend that somebody didn’t like me. She asked to see the comment and, after reading it, remarked that it was rather cruel.

This brings me to my major point about feedback, I think. It’s something that I haven’t yet learned and don’t do well at all. Because I still read that and wonder what post might have urged someone to write that out, re-read it for errors and press publish. Why, on some Sunday night on a post that should not have provoked such a reaction, would someone decide to hurt me?

Cue obsessive thoughts.

I guess I am lame – I’ve never pretended to be someone who’s fascinating and brilliant. I write on my blog most every day about mundane things that somehow caught my attention. I complain and think and giggle at things perhaps only I find amusing.

“You actually did stuff this weekend,” Friend defended me. And I nodded, still wounded, thinking that we’d gone to the botanical garden. Had burritos and ice cream. Talked and taken pictures and wandered around the very pretty day. Surrounded by life!

“And,” she continued thoughtfully, “It seems like a 12 year old on crack would be pretty intense - not lifeless. So this doesn’t even make much sense.”

“But she obviously reads – or read – enough to know how old I am. Which means it’s not a completely uneducated statement. She knows enough to form some opinion based on something I’ve written. And she wanted to hurt my feelings.” I suppose there’s enough memory of when Missy said I was mean in junior high. Or that time that Jill didn’t want to be friends with me when I was 10 that I assume vicious remarks come from females.

I don’t like to think that it was random – that it’s a person who lives far away (SiteMeter didn’t catch the visit. So I set up Stat Counter as a fail safe. I will catch you next time, mean commenter! Freaking site stats…) was just that bored and decided that in addition to reading crap she clearly doesn’t like, she’d also hurt my feelings. I’d rather think it was one of very few people I’ve actually tried to irritate in the years I’ve been online. (I’m not always controlled in that peak emotional intensity – sometimes I behave badly.) But even if that’s true, none of these incidents have been recent. That fact that I still can bug someone that much is bothersome.

And this is the problem I really wanted to address. Even if you can call bullshit on parts of it, there’s enough truth in hateful statements that can nibble at my self-esteem. Every time I hear the word ‘lame,’ some part of my brain reminds me that someone thinks I’m lame and lifeless. Enough to say ‘Wow.’ And once weakened, my sense of well-being is easily attacked by memories of other people who found me lacking – that guy who never called after we went out, the journal editors who didn’t like my papers, when Advisor wouldn’t defend me against statements that I wasn’t ready to graduate, SPB slapping me back for continuing to bug him for resources. So I get sad and some random sentence from a stranger triggers this unnecessary evaluation of what’s wrong with me.

And that’s hard. So if you do it too, I’m very sorry. I wish we didn’t have that in common.

If possible, fix it.
Sometimes criticism, even poorly delivered, is worthwhile. So you fix the figure even when Reviewer Two is a condescending asshole. I thought carefully about whether I wanted an academic job when my weakness in a particular skill emerged over and over. I decided I didn’t – screw you guys, I’m going to industry. If someone says your shoes are brown and should be black, think about it. If that’s right, grit your teeth, tell a friend you have to work with a shoe-obsessed moron and buy some black flats. Perhaps with pretty bows on them!

There are, however, times when something is just wrong. When obsession brings me to the point where I can say, “You know what? How about NO.” I reached that point with a secretary in the department over travel receipts. She couldn’t reimburse meals without receipts, she wrote. So I could find documentation or they’d remove them from the report.

No, I wrote politely. I’ve done this before and meals under $15 aren’t subject to that rule. Check your notes.

No, she replied firmly. Finance wouldn’t accept it.

No, I wrote back, jaw starting to ache from clenching my teeth. If you look on page 14 of the Finance guide, it says there’s a $30 limit for non-documented meals. So I’m actually far under.

She apologized for the confusion, saying that it wasn’t finance but the department who made the rules. And while they might accept one or two meals without receipts, five was too many.

At which point I wrote (and deleted without sending) an email filled with exasperated questions and too many Capital Letters (!) about her nonsensical rules and sense of over-importance. So I waited. I thought about how much I wanted less than $50. And I decided I wanted to win more than I wanted the money. I was willing to go the Boss and the chair of the department over this. I’d dealt with this woman before, was not impressed and was not admitting defeat. (I think I said something about seeing her in Hell first. I'm very dramatic.)

So I wrote an email telling her that I was growing frustrated with how difficult she was making a simple process. I asked her to check with the person who needed to approve this, to let me know if I should meet with said person directly, and when she decided what version of her made-up rules she was going to go with, we could talk again then. I was snippy and firm, but I wanted it to be clear that A) she was annoying and B) I was going to win.

I got email a day later that said she received approval to submit the expenses. Had the circumstances been different – was I staying put rather than packing up to move – this probably would have been a bad call. So the evaluation of when to fight and when to roll over is important. But if you’re going to battle? Win.

Finally? Friends.
Element of truth or not, annoying or heart-breaking, for those of us who take these comments hard, there must be some easing of the hurt. What has worked for me is, quite honestly, writing the blog. Putting words on a screen and letting people read them has worked beautifully in terms of processing situations and receiving sympathy and support.

In the end, I don’t know Anonymous commenter and dearly love Friend. Friend hangs out with me enough that she knows me very well – she doesn’t think I’m lame or lifeless. That lessens that power of some random icky person to cause lasting damage.

Enough of you have called foul on my defense experience that I’ve released what shame and hurt I currently can. I cling to some of it, but it’s not nearly as bad as it was.

I think – from years of reading her blog – that PsycGirl is dedicated and smart and wonderful. She cares about what she does and the people she meets. Anyone who tried to make her feel badly about her progress or talent is a moron and jackass and meanie. I’m absolutely positive about this. And I’m sorry she has to deal with such lower life forms.

I guess I mix Boss’s pride and a bad talk and the former seems more important. I think of staring at giraffes next to Friend at the zoo and compare it to some piece of ick who tried to hurt my feelings. And I think about the giraffes instead of that comment on my post about flowers. I hope that you’re reading because you find something mildly entertaining rather than moderately frustrating, but understand I have limited power in influencing how you think of me. And while I accept – for lack of a better option – that there are sometimes mean people or those who, for whatever reason, choose to create misery for others, my belief is that people are basically good. And that’s somehow enough to keep trying to do whatever it is that I do, even knowing that’s going to earn me more feedback.