Don't take it personally

Has someone ever told you this?  I hear this a lot from people, and it really really enrages me.  It is a sure fire way to ensure that I make things personal and get outraged!  Someone at work does something that is out of line and I'm told "don't take it personally."  I get harassed on the street and a friend tells me "don't take it personally."  Well, there are two problems with this admonishment...the first is that I am not actually taking these interactions personally, I am simply responding to an experience I am having.  The second problem is that I AM in fact a person...so, how else am I supposed to experience inter-human interactions?  Does this statement imply that I am too real of a person, and I need to be less so?  I try to explain to people that my outrage is not actually personal.  I'm not letting other people impose values onto me or absorbing their comments into my sense of self, for example.  But that doesn't mean that I don't FEEL the interaction. 

There's a difference, and I find it really hard to articulate, which is why I am overwhelmingly satisfied with a book that I am reading right now, Kathleen Woodward's Statistical Panic.  She talks about how our society is overly mediated -- from 800 numbers being answered by music or automated voices to the student at a large state university trying to navigate the proper forms and departments to ensure the proper credits for graduation.  The consequence of this mediated society is that we feel these interactions (she coins the term "bureaucratic feelings") in ways that are very impersonal and alienate us, but that still influence us and make us feel a certain way.  Consider for example the outrage you feel when trying to deal with a bill or service by phone and you are speaking to a nameless person who is not being helpful and you get frustrated/outraged.  Impersonal feelings are not the same as personal feelings, which are defined through emotions like love and grief that connect us with people.  I like thinking of how much I feel impersonally versus how much I feel personally.  The distinction is a pretty clear line in my mind, and it was an awesome revelation when I read it today.

I think this distinction between personal and impersonal FEELINGS is one that is not given much credence in our culture.  It leads me to pontificate on one of the many reasons that I really dislike Ralph Waldo Emerson.  It no doubt has to do with him being the uber-individualist.  I know this is an unpopular position, especially in an English department.  But it's a burden I'm more than willing -- and in fact happy -- to bear.  In his essay, "Self-Reliance," Emerson says "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.  Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this.  They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.  Else, to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another."  

Really, Emerson?  A connection that I make with someone because they share the same sentiments that I do is supposed to shame me only because I wasn't in a position to shame them first by speaking something before they did?  This kind of individualist nonsense is precisely the kind of talk that perpetuates privilege and masquerades it as intellectual power rather than social power, which is really its source.  It leads to alienation and inauthentic interactions because it puts each of us as individuals in a race against the other.  But before I digress too far, I brought up Emerson because yes, he is my own personal punching bag, but also because the reason I dislike the excerpt above is because it actually gives me great joy to read a stranger's works who speaks what I've thought and felt all the time.  I feel hopeful about our culture and society when I read that someone far away from my experience is thinking about these things and publishing them...it brings me into a conversation that invites me to contribute and encourages me to continue with my thoughts and what additional insights I might be able to provide.

I just can't get my head around Emerson's quintessential American "coolness."  For the obvious reason that I am not cool and so, I resent his coolness.  But moreso because of how much emotional language he uses in these lines: "come back to us with a certain alienated majesty," "affecting lesson," "take with shame."  Emerson's detached perspective seems to stem from personal emotion that he intellectualizes and makes impersonal.  He takes what is meant to connect us in community with one another through sharing of ideas and experiences and manipulates it in the service of individualism, which I see as somehow...shall I say shameful?