Founding Father

When I was having a chillout session during softball the other day, somebody said something that just started to rattle in my head for some reason.

My very good friend, who is an ex-softball captain, said "I'm the founding father of this team" in chinese. And that is pretty much 100% true. Its factuality is not what's making me turn this line over and over in my head. It's that it challenges a lot of the basic constructs I form my values around. To place it in context. He became the captain as a Year 2 student in Hall, back when only 4 people out of maybe 10 even wanted to stay on in softball. His first year in the team was terrible, with barely anyone showing up for training and a captain who didn't take anything seriously. So he took over, and one of the first things that happened, whether he consciously made the effort to or not, was a lot of his fellow year 2s joined, myself included. If I recall correctly, about 10 of us joined that year even though we were neither year 1s nor had any experience.

So what he said wasn't wrong. He was indeed the "founding father". We remember him as a good captain, but not because of his skill in softball or even in managing the sport. Simply because he was the one to set this all up.

This makes me uncomfortable (in a nice kind of way), because all my life, I thought you needed skill, experience or competency to be a good leader. You needed these things for people to look up to you. And more importantly, you needed these to do a good job. His success goes against all of that. The greatest gift he brought to the table is his good nature as a friend. He made it so that we WANTED to be a part of whatever he was doing, and not him begging us to join him, a typical position most new leaders are put in. 

So why does this make me uncomfortable, really? Part of my personal identity is modeled around this TV character, Dr. Gregory House, and to a certain extent, his primary inspiration, Detective Sherlock Holmes. The idea that being a good is all that matters, regardless of your (unpleasant) personality. I wanted to be so good that people couldn't "find fault" in me. So I often made competency a priority in my life. If I wasn't good at something, I wouldn't be a worthy partner to discuss with. If I didn't know something, I had little value.

But yet at the same time, I didn't see the world in only black and white. My nature is to be slow in reacting to people, especially if they don't give me a reason to. I want to give people second chances because others have also given it to me. I want to help others and bring them up to the same level, hopefully even transcending me. I couldn't really bring myself to hurt or harm people, especially for selfish reasons. All these sides of me, I considered soft, but at the same time, I could not bear to part with them. They are as much a part of my personality as everything else.

So I felt a need to form a "hard" exterior. I needed to look macho, or fearless or strong or whatever. Whatever it took to make me less vulnerable, less easy to take advantage of. I knew at the end of the day, I am a soft person. But I couldn't let the whole world know that. I became more accepting of judgmental eyes, and that has freed me up to be the "asshole" everyone else knows me by. Because I've stopped caring about what others think of me.

Do forgive me for using such a simple and over-generalising language like "hard and "soft".

This is not an easy burden to carry. Most of the times it doesn't bother me. But sometimes it hits like a freight train. A friend in BMT once asked me, why do you feel the need to be macho? I couldn't come up with an answer. The next day he asked me the same question. I still couldn't answer him. The third day he asked me again. That day I almost cried behind my platoon.

My friend's success at his post reflected a fundamental flaw in my personality, the very basis on which I formed my "character" to the outside world. Where I was "outside hard, inside soft", he was exactly the same inside as he was outside. He doesn't lie about disliking you, and he is sincere when he's helping you. He doesn't calculate or need reasons to help people, he just does, the same way he doesn't need reasons to dislike a person. He didn't need to be competent at his job to be successful. He didn't need to have "value" for us to want to be around him.

I don't think I can ever be this naked to the whole world. I think I need this "security blanket" when I face the world. Sometimes, I think about it really hard, and wonder if the hardness is the main reason for my unattractiveness to girls. Then I answer my own question by saying, what if they are even more unattracted to the softness inside.