Dear Folks,
I was a Freshman Counselor at Yale from 1983-84, and the Dean’s office worked hard on training us to guide our counselees through their first months in New Haven. We had workshops on academic advising and how to balance work and play. We met the Bursar, walked through the debits and credits of a typical bill, and found out how to register for classes when you are on financial hold. We talked with coaches whose athletes were Rhodes Scholars. We met professors whose students wrote poems on their Calculus exams. We studied the varieties of sexual expression, alcohol use and abuse, depression, anxiety, and then practiced what we might encounter through role plays. I feel like we were well equipped to deal with the ups and downs of Monday-Friday college life. In hindsight, I wish we’d spent more time learning how to clean up the messes that confronted us on Saturday and Sunday mornings.
I’m not talking about beer cans and solo cups left in entryways, but the conspiracy of silence that often settled on a fun party gone bad. One of the worst was a young woman assaulted in a stairway by an upperclassman as others looked on. A visual artist and sometime model, the woman had shaved half of her head the week before in an experiment on beauty and objectification. (This was the era when Calvin Klein hung nudes several stories high in Times Square.) The man said he “didn’t like the way she looked” and punched her hard enough to leave her doubled over in a heap on the steps.
Where do you start to debrief with a person who now feels like her “home” is not safe for her? What do you say when she tells you she could never tell her parents what happened? How do you engage the young man and his friends when they don’t even remember being at the party only a few days later?
Basements filled with loud music and laughter and parties fueled by alcohol and flirtation are part of adolescence for many of us. That’s the way it goes on weekend nights, we tell ourselves. Crossing boundaries is the point, we sometimes to say. Thank goodness by 2018 we assert that “Yes means yes, and no means no.” But by and large we still don’t teach our “almost adults” how to have the awkward and necessary conversations as daylight dawns if things have gone too far. We can learn to ask questions and to listen deeply: “How are you feeling? What are you thinking? Are you O.K.? Can we talk about last night?” We can put ourselves in the other’s shoes. We can give the person who’s hurt the benefit of the doubt. We can look at patterns of behavior, take an honest inventory, and make amends.
How many of us have forgiveness work to do? Even if some significant transgression is years in the past, if you haven’t dealt with it, its poison lingers. On our best days, our children may listen to what we have to say, but they are always watching what we do. Whether we are a political appointee, a CEO, or a soccer parent, are we modeling accountability and reconciliation?
The next time a relationship falls apart or a line gets crossed that should have been respected, don’t go silent or hide in the shadows of regret. Have an awkward morning conversation instead. When we’re courageous enough, the dawn shines through the broken places.
Love, David