WYFP is our community's Saturday evening gathering to talk about our problems, empathize with one another, and share advice, pootie pictures, favorite adult beverages, and anything else that we think might help. Everyone and all sorts of troubles are welcome. May we find peace and healing here. Won't you please share the joy of WYFP by recommending?
As progressives we are all aware of the more blatant forms of discrimination based on sex, sexual preference, race, religion, socioecomonic class, and similar. A more subtle form of "discrimination" occurs when people make less defined erroneous assumptions about others. Assumptions can range between simple misunderstandings (such as those here who assume I'm male because my user name includes the word "father") to more deliberate "prejudices" (such as those who assume I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth just because I attended a private university, which I assure you I was not.)
Over the course of my life, particularly as an adult, I heard some real doozies about me (and those are just the ones I heard, goodness knows what worse things people assumed about me behind my back.)
When I was working at large accounting firm early in my career, another female staff person aSSumed I was married because (according to her) I wore "such nice clothes" she thought I got to spend my salary on "fun stuff", since my living expenses would have been paid for by this mythical husband. Besides the fact I wasn't even getting asked out on dates let alone in a long term relationship, what was really laughable was that I simultaneously was being derided by a female manager for not wearing clothes that were nice enough. (It's hard to have $$$$ to buy high end clothes when your salary barely covers your rent, food, and car expenses.) How can you be deemed both dressed too nicely and too shabbily at the same time?
What was even more ironic was that was in a profession that's supposed to gather as many facts as possible before making assumptions (to fill in missing information.) Perhaps when it comes to judging other humans rather than documents and data, people revert to emotional biases, regardless of how analytical they are.
A few years ago I had a consulting gig with a small start-up company. When a manager with their outside accounting firm asked me a question about a particular project, I told the guy I would have to find out and get back to him because I was "new to the company" and didn't yet know the information off the top of my head. At no time did I say or imply I was "new" to the profession or to that particular industry, but the guy must have assumed that "new to the company" meant just that, because he immediately starting talking down to me as if I were a newbie entry level staffer. He told me to check certain forms, and described in detail where I was to look and what to look for. ACK! I was older than this guy, had more years of experience, but here I was being treated like someone who needed to have my hand held, all because of his erroneous assumption.
Now, the guy may have had no ill intent in his erroneous assumption, but too often ill intent is a problem in the CPA profession, and was with me in particular. You see, an unspoken hierarchy of sorts occurs in the CPA world, with the presumption that those in large public accounting firms are the most competent, those in smaller public accounting firms are the next most competent, and those who go to private industry are the "flunkies" who couldn't hack it in public accounting of any size or type. Some exceptions apply if you work in corporate accounting for a Fortune 500 company or other industry leader. Then you're presumed to be competent enough to have met the presumed higher standards of those companies. But when you work in the corporate accounting for small companies, regardless of your education or previous experience, then you’re at the bottom of the totem poll as far as those in large firms are concerned. That can have deleterious affects in future job searches, particularly with no-nothing job recruiters who don’t know the difference between a debit and credit.
But I digress.
When the heart is willing, it will make a thousand reasons. When it is unwilling, it will make a thousand excuses.
– ancient saying
My last boyfriend chased after me to get me to date him (I didn’t want to at first, due to reasons related to his first marriage too lengthy to go into here.) After dating him for several months, during which he held me so tight sometimes I thought I could barely breathe, he suddenly became more distant and started questioning my integrity about certain matters. He bordered on the paranoid, making accusations "out of left field" against me. From previous discussions, I realized he was projecting the sins of some of his former girlfriends onto me, despite my having given him absolutely no reason to question me. At one point he implied I’d tried to cheat money from him (a former girlfriend had once tried to extort money from him.) This was insulting to me not just personally, as I’m a rather honest type, but professionally, since as a CPA I had a professional responsibility to be honest. Hey, just because he’d dated some losers before he dated me didn’t make me one of them. But nothing I said or did could convince him of my innocence. He’d already made up his mind (or rather his soon-to-be new girlfriend made it up for him, as I later find out) to think the worst of me, and had to make erroneous assumptions to "justify" his desires.
Yesterday would have been my dad's birthday. He died earlier this year, and his absence has left me without a mediator of sorts with my mother, with whom I have (at best) a strained relationship. For reasons unbeknownst to me (other than my mother's need to pump up her own low self-esteem), she has chosen to make many erroneous assumptions about me in my adult life to "justify" in her mind how bad a person I supposedly am.
My mother has accused me of being "materialistic", despite the fact most of my furniture is either family hand-me-downs or low-end pieces more than 20 years old (the TV is almost 30 years old.) Most of the jewelry I own is of the cheap costume variety, and the many of the pieces of half-way decent jewelry I have were given to me, by her.
Facts don’t stop my mother from making wild accusations about me. The accusations she’s made to my face are bad enough, I can only imagine what she has said about me behind my back.
To summarize, I feel that I’m greatly misunderstood, including by my own family, because many erroneous assumptions have been made about me over the years. Some have fallen into the "no harm, no foul" category while others have been intentionally in the slander/libel category to ruin my reputation (personal or professional), wear down my self-esteem, and bully me (a topic for another diary.) While other people may have assumptions made about them to their benefit (witness Sarah Palin's rapid rise in politics), it seems most of those made about me are negative and to my detriment. So MFP is having to correct erroneous assumptions, and deal with the aftermath of the ones I wasn’t able to overcome.
What’s your fucking problem tonight?