The Challenge of Authority
An essay that aims to answer the following question: When must one break the rules?
As you might or might not know...I'm working on my book. Something that irks me in my writing process so far is the theme of authority. I'm not sure I should focus the book on authority because of a past editor's feedback. I would rather center the book on the exploration of opportunities that stem from being a student. To me, that's where the excitement is at. A hopeful vision of what an education may look like through diligence and financial responsibility.
Today I present you a piece that seems to pop out of place in my work. To stop thinking about it constantly, I've decided to take up this week's post to clear the air. Writing is my therapy so here goes nothing.
Sidenote: a big thank you to all the new readers joining me on my writing journey, I appreciate the love and support!
The biggest contender in my life has been authority. The story starts at the beginning of my conception of who I thought was the boss in my life.
Naturally, the conflict started with my parents. And I don't mean this in a negative light. Stupid two-year-olds need their parents to correct improper or aggressive behaviour. I'll always remember the cold shower my mother inflicted upon me after I refused to use the toilet after being potty trained. I was cold plunging before it was cool! No pun intended.
I've always been a hard-headed and competitive child. It's always been about pushing boundaries for me and I did that at every conceivable moment with my parents and my sisters. I poked the bear all the time and I often got negative feedback from doing that.
Feedback is feedback. You need feedback to learn.
A strange pattern of behaviour I noticed about myself as I grew up was the following. I had a perfect track record at school and a stellar reputation with the community. My mother was proud of me for doing this.
At home, my behaviour comparatively seemed like I was a demon reincarnated. I got in trouble every night. My mother called me "brisefer" which is French Canadian for something akin to "he who breaks everything he touches". It became what I was known for throughout my larger family circles. In my defense, I always felt I never intended to break things! It was the perfect blend of strength, clumsiness, and curiosity.
One day when I was five years old, I remember telling my father that I wanted to play hockey. In the years that followed, I competed by playing for top-level teams from the city in my age group.
Competitive sports are expensive. In those years, my father made sure I had good equipment, great training, and ample opportunities in the sport. At the time, conceptualizing money was difficult. Looking back, he was easily spending up to 10k a year when I played as the goalie for the local AAA hockey team.
You can imagine his disappointment and anger when I didn't perform up to his standard. There was nothing worse than the drive back home from a game that was deemed my fault as the goalie. On the flip side, the man was ecstatically proud when I played with heart and won my team clutch games. He was arguably my biggest fan and always defended me if he thought I had played my best.
Canadian hockey is a meritocracy. Meritocracies are not without politics. The world of competitive hockey for a boy from a small town such as mine revolves around coaches who volunteer. It doesn't come as a surprise when the coaching staff are all parents. Throughout my entire time playing hockey competitively, these same parents were coaching me year after year.
When drama occurred, it was usually between the parents. If you got on the wrong side of one parent, whether it was the coach or not, the consequences trickled on the ice through things like benching players or less ice time.
During my last year in the sport at the age of 12-13 years old, my stellar reputation with the community started to crumble. Perhaps it was a combination of puberty angst and the separation of my parents but amid emotional turmoil, I started speaking out against the authority figures in my life.
I remember the day I lashed out against my coaches in front of my entire team during practice. We were being punished again for playing bad hockey (in other words losing terribly) by skating for the entire practice of one hour and thirty minutes. They made us skate hard, much like suicide sprints, requiring us to skate back and forth between the lines on the ice. I protested loudly against this during a water break. I was screaming back at my imbecile screaming coach.
My argument was the following. If I were to be punished as I should be like the whole team, my punishment should be intense goalie skating drills. It didn't help me to skate sprints like my team. With my oversized equipment, it was just thrice the work with no payoff other than cardio. As a goalie, the best punishment, I argued, would be stiff and technical skating drills involving shuffles and slides around the corner faceoff circle. That conjured more lactic acid than any cardio.
So I stood my ground and protested by practicing self-discipline as the rest of the team was skating relentlessly. I skated just as ferociously but in my anger-swallowing fashion despite the screaming psycho coach's desires.
The next game I was benched right from the start.
Hockey politics and psychological warfare between my coaches and I continued. That season was my last and when I announced that I was leaving the sport to my team, the coach I hated most told me,
"Mat you're the smartest kid I've ever coached!"
I scoffed at that. All I could think was, if you think I'm so smart, why couldn't you listen?
In the years that followed nothing dramatic happened. I started high school and became the preppy little politician-esque student of my grade. I was friends with the jocks because of my past resume in hockey. I was friends with the nerds because I enjoyed learning. I was friends with the degenerate crypto bros because we partied together.
The new authority I respected was my high school principal. She was my harbinger of volunteer opportunities. Those experiences kept me out of the classroom regularly, so I was always courteous with the adults to make sure my reputation was as good as it got. I learned crazy things like how to host an audience from a local comedian and how to rile up signatures and present them to the provincial government through an MPP-supported petition.
It was all nice and dandy until the pandemic brought a stop to it all. It was late junior year (11th Grade) when it all happened.
Institutional learning now happened at home and so the bleed of my shadow and my chaotic at-home tendencies propelled itself into my school life.
I got in trouble. Like big trouble. All for starting a podcast with my buddies during the lockdown where we talked shit about whatever it was we had on our minds. It wasn't proper. It was the ugly honest merger of my two lives brought together.
After a couple of episodes, I was shut down by my principal. With clear intent on not mentioning any names, one of our conversations talked about red flags in women. A girl from our class got a nervous breakdown because she thought we were slandering her in this particular story. Her parents snitched to the principal, and so I was indirectly threatened with all sorts of implied punishments like the revocation of volunteer opportunities and scholarships if I didn't cooperate.
It's no surprise that my principal didn't approve of our conversations surrounding women. She thought we were all being sexist little boys by objectifying women on a scale. The high school golden boy couldn't be seen or heard talking about such things.
Nonetheless, I took it personally. This woman, my mentor, came between me and my dream of starting a podcast with brutal insults about my character. During my senior year, I retaliated. It wasn't pretty.
Students have been walked all over since the pandemic. In a brilliant last stunt in the winter, before I graduated, I helped coordinate a schoolboard-wide petition to cancel or modify exams to push for leniency. At the time in Ontario, many high schools had announced that exams would be canceled or amended to final projects to accommodate students in lockdowns. The petition was written by a dear friend of mine and was posted by another. Through social media, we got the petition to get 700 signatures in just one night. This was absurd for a small city. All my friends from different walks of life were all excited about it.
The next morning, the whole school buzzed with chatter. Students came up to me and asked how could they help. They all knew I was involved even though my name didn't appear on the petition. I was the little political connector and that was well-known.
Then came the announcement that the school parliament was needed in the library. I got a few respected good lucks from my classmates as they knew I would be getting in trouble.
What followed was a 2 hour mostly one-on-one debate on bad leadership between myself and my principal. She fired insults at our group by attempting to call us bad leaders because we hadn't reported this stunt to a "trusted" adult. I refuted the dumb argument. Many "trusted" parents had signed the petition. Honestly, for the rest of the debate, I highlighted why she was wrong and why she shouldn't take the petition personally. I threw a couple of verbal jabs here and there until ultimately I shifted the conversations toward solutions for students. She was furious for getting outmatched.
The only good thing that came out of this was that the blame for the stunt mostly fell upon my shoulders. This meant that the better local scholarships were still won by my deserving friends, the so-called other "bad leaders" at the end of the school year.
The struggle with authority didn't stop there for me. It left me empty and extremely insecure. These figures still represented opportunities and experiences for which I was grateful. I was still butthurt and conflicted about having to engage in these disputes with people whom I had once respected. When I realized that these authority figures, really these people, were engaged in their own meek thoughts about what it is they ought to do in their institutional role, I came to accept their imperfect authority.
It consolidated my need to stand up to it and respect it at the same time.
When did I learn this?
The summer when I graduated high school, I joined the military. The authoritative chain of command taught me exactly when to break rules.
When the consequences of not breaking them outweigh the consequences of breaking them.
Thanks for reading, I'll see you next week.
-MS
Impressive
I see you and I had similar childhoods. 😄 It wasn't a reason at the time, but becoming a creative professional has helped me with this immensely. For one, it's now literally my job to question conventions and work outside of them by making something new. I'm more of a "look for possibilities" person than I am someone who defers to conventions anyway, so it's a good fit. It's fun for me.
But new things require risk, and risk is scary. I constantly have to tackle pushback from those who make the final decisions about my work, but are seldom willing to take on the risk that progress requires. This forces constant conversation about what our mutual goals are, how best to reach them, and which approaches provide the closest balance in risk/reward ratio. That's been an invaluable practice for me.