Credit

I've been thinking a lot lately about the ways we change ourselves for other people. Can knowing the right person at the right time really alter who you become as a person, what values you hold? Does it matter if those people ever know the role that they've played? To a teacher you were just one in a class of thirty, in five classes that term, over a twenty year career; to you he was the professor who opened up to you a new way of reading, thinking, looking at problems in school and out of it. A youthful crush made you change the way you dressed, they way you thought about yourself, and forced you out of your comfort zone. They never felt the same way you did, how much credit do they have for the transformation?

The most recent of the many examples of this in my life was two years ago, a guy I met in a pub one night out with friends. I thought his good opinion would be well worth having. I took a long, hard look at myself and my politics, and found more than a few things worth examining, and several that I consequently changed views on completely. I got out of my comfort zone and went out of my way to befriend him, and I ended up with a friendship that has lasted more than two years and leaving school. But he never looked at me that way, or if he did it was only in passing and quickly gotten over. I know him so much better than I did back then, I know he is just as fallible as I am, and just as human. But I still value his opinion, and despite our own respective relationships and commitments, I do believe I'm still just a little bit in love with him, or maybe I'm just in love with the feeling of accountability and purpose I had at that time and place.

It's not so surprising that I might mix the two things in my head. I remember my drive and determination a few years ago, a drive that I lost somewhere along the way, which despite several whole-hearted attempts, I just can't seem to regain. Every time I start to think that the problem has gotten beyond me a voice in my head tells me I must not be trying hard enough, I'm making a fuss over nothing, maybe I'm just whining. Lately I've decided to stop listening to that voice, a mix of my dad's 'pull yourself up by your bootstraps' lecture and a lifelong fear of being a bother to anyone. It's not so easy to get past it, though, and I haven't actually done anything about my problems, whatever they may be, besides tell myself I'm going to do something about them.

This is where it connects to my musing about other people's influence in my life. It took one boy in the eighth grade who never looked at me twice, and an insightful and fatherly english teacher to break my thirteen-year debilitating shyness and convince me to join the drama and debate teams, of all things. One drunk in a bar eight years later pushed me to turn what was becoming a year long abandonment in a strange place into the most meaningful and genuinely fun period of my life. If it comes down to my feeling that I need to hold myself accountable to someone else in order for me to effect change for the better, that's got to be at least a part of the problem I'm having so much trouble getting off my ass and getting help with. But if that's what it takes to get me there, who the hell do I charge this effort to?