[21] Treat-to-Treated Exchange.

An Op-Ed that argues against "treating others the way you want to be treated," with an explanation for why I write.

As much as I’ve criticized reflection in these chopinions articles, I lovingly laud it — in fact, I relapse into reflection regardless of what I’ve written to criticize it. But this article comes at a time when I’m not exactly prepared to write. This lack of preparation is intentional. 

1 WHY I WRITE 

I’ve spent some time away from mulling over every moment of my life. I felt as though committing myself to write (jotting down thoughts before bed, taking bullet points during movies, making notes of shared conversations) made me derive inaccurate conclusions about the world. Inaccurate because, though the logic of my world outlook holds within a hypothetical vacuum with its hypothetical context, it fails to acknowledge that the world is unabashedly unpredictable. 

I know that you can’t expect anything else to change other than your approach to the world. But I think I’ve tried to push this barrier as much as possible with my writing — even if I can’t change the world, can I manipulate certain circumstances to preserve the status quo? I write (and, as such, reflect) from a place of pride, because I believe I possess the ability to predict the unpredictable world. And I hope that I’ll reflect long enough, hard enough that I’ll be able to make the unpredictable world predictable. 

But to preserve a happy status quo? Given that I’m scared of regressing on made progress and stagnating in making progress, it surprised me to realize that perhaps all I’d hoped to conserve has been bits of my past that once brought me joy. Perhaps it’s loyalty to people who’d once meant the world to me, perhaps it’s the dread of repeating past mistakes with past implications, perhaps it’s dignity to know I have the power to preserve my happiness. 

Inward reflection has helped me understand why I felt the ways I felt during key emotions during key moments of my life — the understanding of which factors made me sad (such as disappointment, betrayal, humiliation, loneliness, insecurities, frustration, incompatibility, unluckiness, envy, hopelessness) and which made me happy (such as triumph, gratitude, fulfillment, longingness, validation, nostalgia). 

2 PRICE TAG 0:24-0:29

I thought that making note of these factors would guarantee that I could lean into that which made me happy but, more importantly, fight back against that which made me sad. I wrote to remind myself of what I had learned from reflection but also to share what I’d “realized” about the world with others. In a sense, my approach was to try to influence others to take on my outlook — perhaps it’s from the opinion that if everyone had my outlook on the world, we’d all be happy. 

Outward yearning for others to match my needs never felt out of hand. I felt as though it was justified for me to expect my friends to act in accordance with my outlook on the world because of the way I’d treated them — if you treat others the way you want to be treated, then you should be treated as such, no? 

I argued that my peers who failed to treat me as such were of poor conduct. Sometimes that’s true. But, then again, it’s in vain to try to find blame in conflict — remember, both sides are always at fault, and so I’m not acquitted from my fault because I feel as though I’m “less to blame.” The only thing I could really expect from my friends is that how they treated me matched well with how I wanted to be treated. And so, perhaps I shouldn’t have treated others the way I wanted to be treated but should have treated them the way they wanted to be treated. 

3 THE TOFFY PRINCIPLE

For a decent chunk of my life, my friends were the most important people in my life. There’d been the odd fear that I’d loved my friends more than they loved me, but that fear quickly subsided when I knew that it was a privilege to love and that I loved loving my friends. 

I once held deep conversations with high regard — but after I had my fair share with a fair many peers, it no longer possessed its great importance. That aforementioned decent chunk existed when I held deep relationships with high regard. And for a while, that’s what I wanted to preserve, as these relationships were what formulated a great deal of my happiness. 

But it’s become evident that not only is it impossible for every relationship to be deep, but not every relationship will last. Instead of tolling over why my friends won’t reciprocate a desire to maintain both the caliber and continuance of our relationships, it seems I simply need to learn to circumnavigate these interactions better. It only sucks that too much has happened too far long ago and went unaddressed for far too longer that I don’t think I’d be given the chance to remedy these relationships before graduation. 

4 THERE ARE NO AXIOMS

My reflection seems to be in hopes of being prepared — prepared enough to avoid a status quo ridden with sad factors and to preserve those happy factors. But even this preparation seems to be in vain. 

I seem to have fallen victim to the fallacy of formulaic truth — the belief that the aspects of life can be grouped, then summarized — because there are no axioms to life. History never truly repeats itself, and acting out of the fear of repeating past mistakes or working towards reliving a past high seems to be a grave mistake that I’ve been making with reflection. The fear that, by looking to avoid something, I was actively working towards it. 

I’m somewhat stubborn when it comes to what I believe about the world to be true (especially if it’s something I’d extracted from my own experience). I think it’s materialized into this all-or-nothing (shoutout Libby) approach to life — either I pour all my love or deny any semblance of concern for someone or something. But it would crush me to know that my own stubbornness of insisting how the world works (and, by extension, how the world should work), I sealed my own demise. 

I want to be steadfast, not stubborn. It’s not that reflection is bad, but rather the expectations that I have for it. I strive to be more grateful for what I possess currently without depending too much of my happiness on my possessions. Things always end up working out and return to a happy medium — stay hopeful when shit hits the fan and fully embrace the happy moments.