by Serguey Shinder
Someone once told me, in a review I did not enjoy, that I made people around me feel a little smaller. Not cruelly, they said, just constantly, through a hundred small corrections and a way of being right that left no room for anyone else to arrive at the answer themselves. I remember the exact temperature of my defensiveness. I explained, calmly and at length, all the reasons they were wrong.
I spent close to a year quietly arguing with that feedback in my head. I collected counter-evidence. I noted every time I had been generous, every time I had held back a correction, and I filed each one as proof that the assessment had been unfair. The energy I put into disproving it was enormous, which, had I been paying attention, should have told me something.
What finally broke the argument was noticing the pattern of my own reaction. Nobody defends that hard against something entirely false. The intensity of my need to be exonerated was itself the evidence I kept refusing to read. If the feedback had truly been baseless, I would have shrugged and forgotten it in a week. Instead I had built a year-long legal case, and you do not hire a lawyer for a crime you did not commit.
That was a genuinely humbling thing to sit with. The feedback had been accurate, and the accuracy was precisely why it hurt, and the hurt was precisely why I had fought it. I had mistaken my discomfort for a signal that the criticism was wrong, when it was actually a signal that it had landed somewhere true.
I have come to treat that reaction as information now. When feedback makes me defensive out of all proportion, when I find myself building a case rather than simply considering it, I have learned to read the intensity as a map. It points, fairly reliably, at the thing I least want to look at and most need to. Comfortable feedback tells me little. The feedback I want to argue with is usually the feedback that knows me.
Changing the actual behaviour took much longer than admitting it, and I am not finished. I still catch the reflex to correct, to be right at someone else’s expense, to fill a silence with my own certainty. But I no longer argue with the person who named it. I look for them, because they told me something true when it would have been easier to tell me nothing.
The hardest feedback to accept, I have found, is not the feedback that is wrong. It is the feedback that is right about something I had built my self-image on not being.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
Leave a Reply