The Mentoring Program

Last month, I applied for a mentoring program in my county, and got in immediately. I was given the information by my career counselor, and I acted upon it not expecting anything to happen. The next morning, I got a call from one of the program directors informing me that training would start the next day.

Over the course of the training, I found myself doing things I never would have thought I would do: Skipping karate the month before my brown belt test, and driving to a nearby town to get fingerprinted. At the end of the program, however, I had to do a collage. I am not an artistic person. Yes, I can write, but I failed arts and crafts in kindergarten; I couldn't cut a straight line if someone handed me $10 million. Luckily, I had my mom and sister to help. Despite my panicked disposition, the collage turned out extremely well. I hope I get to see it again, and I wish I could show it to my friends.

Unfortunately, I also had to present said collage in front of the rest of the group. I didn't prepare--I don't prepare for anything like that--but I managed to do two things: 1) not screw up, and 2) not scare everyone away.

This week, I am meeting with one of the program directors to finally be matched, and I am very excited.

After my correspondence with one of my classmates from training, I am thinking about why I am doing this, why I am so adamant about participating in this program. I know why--I said it to them: Because I was bullied, and I wanted to help another kid who was going through that avoid a path to self-destruction.

In my last email to my training classmate, I explained that children become bullies because they have no capacity for empathy, which is a result of no one ever conferring value upon them. But if that were true, then why is it that I have so much of what they lack? Why should I be so compelled to benefit the society under which at this time I feel so oppressed?

The answer lies in my own experience. In a way, my life has become a circle, and it is the enormous drive to stop it from happening to someone else. No one should ever have to go through what I did. It is a way to close this chapter of my life, to become a whole being.

Seven years of severe bullying, and another five and a half years of major depression has had a profoundly negative effect on how I relate (or, rather, not) to other people even long after the original oppression has ended. I have an overwhelmingly negative perception of myself in the eyes of others; I don't expect people to care about me, and therefore I do not do anything to compel them; I am very unsure of others' trustworthiness, and it is remarkably rare for me to ask anyone to do anything for me. This, in part, is what has made the job search so difficult, because I don't expect people I don't know to treat me like another human being, and it is far too easy for me to become cynical when others don't do what they say they will (such as call me back when they say they will). Overall, I often feel alienated, and my relation even to others I do know is often in question, sometimes without cause.

Some of these issues are what I will be dealing with in others--in my mentee--but how can I ever overcome them myself? Am I impenetrable? Has anyone ever tried? How much do those I know really know about me? Will I ever know?

There is so much worldly experience I have never had--things that normal people have what seems like easy access to, and I wonder just what I did to be so excluded.

I have just finished The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and I have to wonder if I am doing what I do--reading, philosophizing--because I have limited access to the real world? Do I sit there reading Being & Nothingness simply because I am looking for a way to fill empty time? What am I hoping to do with all of this knowledge--knowledge that others seem to do perfectly well without?

Or, has it prepared me for this? Do I feel ready to enter into this uncharted territory because of what I learned about myself and others?

Joining the mentoring program is the one thing I have done that I do not doubt; I know it must be done, for myself and for my relation with the world. It is the only way this is ever going to end.

Excerpt From My Project

"Let us assume that this program was adopted, and produced a single, brilliant generation of over 5 million children, who went on to college, and majored in science, math, gender studies, English, art, and music. After college, when they finally look for work, they will come across people who are still tied to their own petty interests. This generation will lose all sense of right and wrong as their own ideals are dissolved into an endless bureaucracy that only cares about its own existence, and the nebulous entity will punish any of these gifted people for acting in an unorthodox manner, even if their ideas would improve it.

The nature of institutions is such that it cannot afford to care about anything except for itself, and the immense weight of this overprotection and paranoia bears down upon those who operate beneath it to the degree that the only manner by which one is to survive is to embrace Sartre’s Bad Faith: In our context, it is to pretend to oneself that s/he is having a real impact upon the world in his or her everyday life, even—especially--if the opposite is objectively true. It is here, then, that our goal in this project is totally and irredeemably lost, and it is against this crushing reality that I pound away at my keyboard."