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So many alerts from y’all about Bean Dad™! I couldn’t read it all. It was just so long and loud and performative. But this stood out. More than anything, if he knows this I hope he tells his kids this exact thing (and, obviously, works on getting out of his own way). [thread/]
![So many alerts from y’all about Bean Dad™! I couldn’t read it all. It was just so long and loud and performative. But this stood out. More than anything, if he knows this I hope he tells his kids this exact thing (and, obviously, works on getting out of his own way). [thread/]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eq0zEOuW8AAGBCW.jpg "So many alerts from y’all about Bean Dad™! I couldn’t read it all. It was just so long and loud and performative. But this stood out. More than anything, if he knows this I hope he tells his kids this exact thing (and, obviously, works on getting out of his own way). [thread/]")
I was JUST talking about this with @carekendrick. Almost every lesson I learned from my dad was rooted in his anxieties about his own shortcomings and preparedness. I rarely learned the lessons themselves, but most certainly picked up on and was repelled by the unspoken baggage.
And since I’ve been re-learning the lessons he tried to teach on my own. They were hard to learn not because the value wasn’t inherent, but because he brought his issues to teaching them and, without acknowledging it, tainted the potential lesson.
So much of what we are taught is some supposed protection from some terrifying alternative rather than simply being taught or shown things because knowledge itself is a beautiful and valuable objective. It imbues every lesson with that fear.
Or it teaches us that only some things are worth knowing and not others and we spend our adult lives trying to figure out what some shit is hard or impossible to learn. Or we are incentivized only to value the things our parents praised and inadvertently excise the rest.
Because when our parents imbue everything with their baggage, we deal with it in different ways. We either rebel (me) or we go limp and relent to the current, internalizing their values, fears and anxieties because it’s easier that way.
Either way, we end up losing a lot of time when we have to do lots of work trying to untangle these learned reflexes and coping mechanisms to make way for ourselves, our interests, and our learning styles.
I just wish—in the absence of seeing knowledge as inherently invaluable and not strictly a survival skill—my dad had the self awareness to say, “I want for you to learn this thing because I have anxiety around the idea of myself not knowing it...”
I think these things are important because not knowing them would have made me feel inadequate, and also my dad valued them and I wanted him to love me so this is why I get weird about them. But let me show you how to do it because knowing stuff is good no matter the reason.”
Maybe we could have shared in that process, rather than him being messy at me and me being repelled because I felt like learning, at least from him, always felt a little heavy and gross. I know why he wasn’t capable of all that and I feel for him, but it would have been nice.
We all know on some level that the tone and approach of a lesson often has more power than the lesson itself. I just hope that kid doesn’t get immediately repelled from learning stuff because it’s been turned into their dad’s anxiety gauntlet.
