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Schools are designed to produce students who can perform well on standardized tests. Just like sissy did. Five years after that, I was Miss May Day Princess. Five years after that, I’m graduating from San Diego State University. When the ceremony ends, I dash up the stairs to find them. When I turn around to see my mom, she is holding her face. Oh, it must be the honors cord, I think to myself. She can see how smart I am, how hard I’ve worked. Sissy didn’t graduate with honors. I realize these aren’t tears of joy. I haven’t seen my family since Christmas. I lost most of my thick Portuguese hair. 
Coming In From The Cold
And I have disappointed Mom. The data confirms that what happened to Myshel will happen to many millions of us. Not necessarily the eating disorder, but the losing of yourself. To find our way back to those parts of us that get buried beneath the world and all the other people within it, we need to lay bare what’s causing so many of us to get lost in the first place. Because this mass losing of self, this epidemic of alienation, isn’t happening by accident. Here she had to parse the similarities between a parallelogram and a rhombus, describe the characteristics of an isosceles as compared with an equilateral triangle, and learn how to calculate the area under a straight line. And then a curved line. It was dauntingly detailed, a yearslong program of precise terms, methods, functions, practices, and conventions. No one has yet put this sort of thinking and lesson design into those skills that’ll help my daughter live her fullest life. Is she being true to them? How can she channel her loves toward her contribution at work? How can she use what she loves to draw strength from life? Yes, sure, she may hear a Steve Jobsian commencement address, or listen to a compelling podcast, but she’ll find nothing that approaches the level of rigor of her geometry class. Don’t misunderstand. I’m a big fan of geometry. Climb That Hill
More than likely, your life didn’t start off this way. They gazed at you as a toddler, delighting in your curls, your giggles, your teetering and twirling and dashing and tumbling, and they dreamed of your future. They looked for all that was right and best about you. They saw in their mind’s eye the biggest, most beautiful image of you, and they cherished it, holding it so close to their hearts that they ached with love for you and all that you could become. You were the center of their world, the foundation of all morality, all ethics, all joy. And when they asked themselves Will she be happy? How can I guide her, hold her, comfort her, lift her up when she falls? they knew that, to all these questions, love was the answer. You sat in loveless classrooms where your uniqueness was submerged beneath the relentlessness of standardized testing. Who you were on the inside was subordinated to all that you were required to be from the outside. Learning became merely information transfer and confirmation, where the project was to fill you with facts and skills, and your level of fullness was periodically checked by testing. The best student was the fullest. What percentile was your weight, your height, what grade level were you reading at, how was your emotional intelligence at birthday parties? Through your actions, their reputations were at risk. Their love for who you really were turned into fear of who you really were, and whether you would measure up. Things Happen That Way
Whether they would measure up. The uniqueness of what you love or loathe is beside the point. You are judged not by how intelligently you’ve cultivated your unique loves, but by how closely you’ve matched the models. So, in truth, you won’t just get lost. Little wonder we’re facing such an epidemic of lost people. Why do they do this? Why do schools and workplaces not take your loves seriously? Why do they not make a point of teaching you your own love language, and helping you turn your loves into contribution? Why do they instead push you to a place where you are cut off from yourself? Why do they subject you to this sort of relentless pressure to conform? Why do they not start with you, the individual, and then follow you down through all the doorways and hallways and secret passages of your unique loves and loathes? Why wasn’t anyone curious about her love life? Why didn’t anyone ask her which sorts of patterns she loved the most and why? Why didn’t anyone look into the precise detail of her loves and help her see how to begin turning these into a contribution or a learning? Why didn’t anyone teach her how to use her daily experience at school, or later at work, to add even more specificity to her loves and what she could make with them? Why didn’t anyone take that approach with Myshel, as they did with the thousands of students in Donnie’s class and the school where he works? Were the students shedding tears of relief that someone had finally stopped trying to fill them up and instead was showing curiosity about what was already there? Was it the release of being seen and heard without having to serve up the right answer? Workplaces are designed to ensure that everyone in the same role performs it in the same way, so that products and service experiences are all delivered at the same level of quality. What value does your unique pattern of loves have in a world where the project of school and work is to create uniform outcomes? To the pragmatist, it has zero value. More accurately, it has negative value. Your unique loves are seen as an obstacle to what schools and workplaces are trying to produce. All of which would make so much sense if you were indeed an empty vessel.