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I struggle constantly with pedantry, whether it's “correcting” my own
words or others', reading and re-reading a line of poetry or a line of
code to assure myself of its correctness—or its error—or revolting
at the sight of a misplaced comma.
Of course, I still mistake in these areas; pobody's nerfect, after all.
But I still have to deal with this unconscious strategy—correct for
its overcorrections.
When I was 7 or 8 years old, I was deep in to this addiction, niggling
at little spelling errors or “he and me” instead of “he and I.”
And since I was “objectively correct,” I felt validated in bothering
my parents and my siblings and my friends with the trivia that I
learned.
The obviously anti-social aspects of this tendency didn't even dawn on
me because this type of behavior and thin-but-annoying knowledge was
rewarded by the school system.
Learning this trivia, while technically a type of learning, prevented me
from a lot of humanities, more flexible and expressive language, and
more connective learning.
I also used a set of beliefs to justify this rigidity: that facts were
inherently deducible, rational, and extremely prevalent, so I could be
either objectively right or objectively wrong.
Since school taught me to prefer being right over being wrong, I held on
to the facts that I knew and avoided anything I didn't already get.
This adaption worked great for standardized tests and for essays graded
for grammar, so my gradual transition away started, by necessity,
outside of school.
For me, it was Model United Nations.
My first serious Model UN conference was at Georgia State University,
and in the nights and weeks before, I had had to develop and create a
position based around the policies of the Netherlands on immigration and
on a human rights/aid issue.
I know now that neither of these can ever have an absolutely correct
answer, but at the time I searched at length for The One True Policy of
the Netherlands on Immigration (TM), and didn't find it.
I read that there were dozens of different policy proposals (should we
open up the EU's borders or close them but provide FDI to emigrants? It
looked like Holland had supported both).
And there was a basketful of existing United Nations programs to choose
to support or to adjust, yet none of them were explicitly, singularly
supported by the Netherlands.
Not being able to find the correct answer was a distressing experience.
So, during the conference, which is centered around giving speeches and
convincing others to support whichever policies you chose, I stayed
quiet so I wouldn't be wrong.
And, of course, I didn't win any awards from a performance like that.
The next time around, at a conference run by the University of
Georgia, I took a similar path.
I was a little less focused on specifics, but I still stressed over
whether the policy that I settled on was the right one, and I tried to
hedge my bets by dragging in as many other ideas as I could.
But once I got to the conference and needed to actually present, this
wouldn't work.
I had prepared parts of speeches that I recited anxiously, but once I
got through my one or two monologues, I was lost.
Thankfully, I had a much more experienced partner to help guide me.
They gave me one piece of advice (that seems absurdly obvious in
retrospect): “just go up and say something.”
So I tried it.
I rambled for 45 seconds (to the tee) about how allocating FDI for
refugee camps in Turkey was the best possible solution to the Syrian
refugee crisis, and even though it wasn't THE solution, it was
something, and it worked because there is no absolute truth.
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