I’m Banging My Head Against a Wall

My Head is Bleeding but the Wall’s Not Budging

photo by Stephano Pollio on Unsplash

Sometimes I just want to give up. I get so discouraged by people who just don’t want to even try to open their minds to anything different from what they already know.

I put into practice my best “deep listening” skills when interacting with these people, I try to empathize with where they’re coming from, I try to find some mutual point of view between us, but I realize that these people don’t want to put in any effort at all for listening to me.

They either pretend to listen (while their responses show that maybe they heard, but they didn’t listen), or, worse, they just continue to state their original point of view, only this time even louder.

I am not asking these people to change their point of view to my point of view; I am only asking that they at least listen to what I am saying in the same manner that I listened to them. But, that rarely happens.

I’m not a person who talks constantly. I learned at a very young age that the less I talked, the more I was listened to when I did speak. A person who can’t stop chattering is usually tuned out.

So, I limit voicing my opinion to what I consider to be “the important stuff” — issues of injustice, climate change, racism, scams, healthcare, housing. These are issues that I feel morally compelled to address. I don’t want to be the bystander who contributes to injustice with my silence.

But this is where the realization comes in: I’m hitting my head against a brick wall; I’m bleeding; the wall’s not budging. But I don’t want to give up; these issues are too important to ignore.

After some exhausting experiences of fighting the status quo, and deliberating on “give up/don’t give up”; I realized that those weren’t the only two options available. I could still fight the fight, but I could use different tactics.

I could apply the rules of medical triage. In the emergency room, the triage nurse prioritizes treatment according to severity of injury and who has the best chance of being saved.

People who are stubbornly close-minded are tfg’s.