Reflection: Hiding from the Sun
Respect is a strange thing. It can mean so many different things to different people. In the case of Ledger, the respect he was looking for in “life” had been denied him by those he sought the approval of. Then, in his final death, he saw someone respecting him without ever meeting him, and that cooled the flames of his own anger. While Grey is lower in status, and not a member of a clan who held sway over Ledger’s own, it was an outsider who looked upon his work, and saw its value regardless of being from the enemy faction. I wonder what it must feel like for those who were deemed your enemy to show you more respect than those who were supposed to be your allies.
Callie, however, sees respect as submission. She expects those around her to show her respect by kowtowing to her every whim and word, and when they push back, she sees it as being disrespected. Thinking about how her relationship with Marcus must be, I’m not overly surprised that she sees respect in this manner. To show Marcus respect, she probably had to keep her mouth shut outside of “Yessir” or “No Sir” and just go along with what she was told. So when he told her to gain the respect of those in her coterie, she went into the situation trying to act like Marcus. This also explains a lot about how she views Natalia’s actions towards Marcus as disrespectful, since Callie views the Baroness as unworthy of the position, and thus by not submitting to Marcus, the ‘clearly superior’ baron, she’s showing disrespect.
However, one of my favorite expressions of respect has to be between Isadora and Grey in this chapter. It's that respectful disrespect, that tightrope walked in our modern society where being able to do something that is deemed disrespectful by society with one another is the utmost sign of respect and trust between two people. Her little quip about “ladies first” and sauntering away, giving Grey the opportunity to stare at her ass as she walked away, which he gladly took, would be seen as disrespectful in modern society if it were one sided, or seen as crude if done publicly, but in the moment it shows that they are beginning to, if not bring down their walls, but build a bridge between their fortresses. They’re being playful with one another, sharing interests, and risking themselves to keep the other safe. While I still wouldn’t be comfortable saying that they were in love with each other yet, I’m definitely comfortable saying that they respect one another and have a growing and deepening trust.
Most importantly, where did this respect come from and why is it so easy for these two to develop trust? Diego and Grey are also beginning to trust one another, but they’d known each other for months at this point in the story, whereas Grey and Isadora are closer than the boys after less than a week. Infatuation is right out, as both Grey and Isadora are more sapiosexual than anything, rather it was how both approach respect that made things easier for them to develop that trust.
Diego felt his beliefs often challenged by Grey, and not just his religious beliefs, but also his belief in the Anarch movement and his bitterness at Grey’s constant comparison to how the Anarch and Camarilla power structures failed to differ from one another, thus creating a block due to the emotional barrier Diego put up. Now, Diego is entitled to his opinions and his emotions are valid, but these were indeed speed bumps to him and Grey bonding, whereas Isadora didn’t have the same hangups. She approached each of Grey’s comments and thoughts logically, and met him where he was.
This in no way is meant to invalidate people who base their respect off of emotional intelligence rather than logical mandates, but because both Grey and Isadora used logical thinking as a means of understanding each other, it was easier for them to establish these bonds. Diego couldn’t meet Grey where he was, nor vice versa, but they got there eventually by learning how to best communicate with each other. Of course Grey would earn the respect of someone who spoke his language sooner than someone who didn’t.
But that brings us to Callie. She’s the most difficult of the four to create these kinds of bonds. She is more emotional than either Grey or Isadora, but her barriers are built off of fear and trauma, which when mixed with emotion and abuse, make for higher, thicker walls. She approaches respect as a transaction, and already assumes that the people around her have red in their ledgers as far as she’s concerned.
When I was a teacher, I would walk into my classroom and lay down the law with my students on day one. I wasn’t a dictator because for starters, that doesn’t work, all dictators get overthrown and the word ‘dick’ is in the title for a reason. What I would tell them was simple: “You’re not children, you’re young adults. The word ‘Adult’ is paramount there. That means that you walk in here with a baseline level of respect from me. Your actions are going to dictate if that level goes up or down. If it goes up, I’m happy to work with you when you have a problem or go out of my way for you if you need help. If it goes down, I’m not going to treat you poorly, but I’ll treat you bureaucratically. I’ll provide the help I am legally obligated to by my profession and no more than that.”
Surprisingly, this worked really well, which is why I kept using it from year to year. I treated them like adults, kept my word, and treated them how I promised I would. This took me from having a handful of ‘good kids’ and a classroom of ‘behavioral problems’ to a class of pretty good kids, and a handful of assholes. More often than not, those assholes were shut down by the rest of the class.
Callie is one of those assholes. The kids who walk into the room with a chip on their shoulder expecting to get respect they haven’t earned, and seeing a baseline to work from as an insult to their perceived value as a person. She’s the kid I’d be talking about when I gave them my second line: “I don’t care about your self-esteem. It’s not my job to pat you on the head and tell you you’re special. I ain’t your mama. What I care about is your self-efficacy.”
Normally I’d pause here and ask them if they knew that ‘self-efficacy’ was, and in the stunned silence of a room full of entitled children hearing for the first time from a teacher that their self-esteem was unimportant, it was the faces of understanding (often few and far between) that I would call upon.
For readers who don’t know, self-esteem is how you feel about yourself. High self-esteem means you feel really good about yourself, whereas low self-esteem means you feel bad about yourself. You would think that a teacher would care about how a student feels about themselves, though from my experience most have very high self-esteem with nothing to back it up with, and a handful have really low self-esteem despite many reasons they should have high self-esteem.
Self-efficacy, which I was far more concerned with, is a person's faith in their abilities. For instance, I have a decent level of self-efficacy when it comes to writing, running TTRPGs, small home repair, and education. Thus, when it comes to my self-esteem in these areas, it’s decently high. See, the reason I didn’t care about my student’s self-esteem was because I was more concerned with their self-efficacy and building that. When you build efficacy, you build esteem. Once my students learned that, they learned that I wasn’t going to give them empty compliments to soothe their egos. I was going to tear their egos to shreds so that when they rebuilt them, they were building on an actual foundation rather than on the shifting sands of empty validation.
Callie’s whole existence is built on that kind of foundation. She may be an adult, but she’s never matured past that level where I met my students at. The level of assumed ego, assumed esteem, of a belief that she has more value than she actually does because she feels she should. Respect is something earned through time and action, and through her time with the coterie, she’s done little to earn anyone’s respect, though she’s earned some sympathy, which probably hurts her worse than disrespect.
How do we heal these wounds? How do we build this respect? As I said before, some of it is baseline. However, we also need to meet people where they are. If I wanted to earn my students’ respect, I’d meet them where they were: young people who were never listened to and who were expected to give respect without it being earned. I listened to their concerns, and I showed them a baseline respect that I would show any other adult, and because I did, my relationships with them grew a lot faster than if I’d taken the typical route that teachers I’d had took. Does that work with all students, or even all people? Of course not, but that’s the point of having your baseline, and from there meeting people where they are. Callie’s baseline is skewed, though in fairness, so is Grey’s and Isadora’s and even Diego’s. It is my hope that each of them, as parts of myself, will figure out their baseline and develop into solid members of a coterie built on mutual respect and understanding. With those two things firmly in place, there’s nothing that they can’t build… or with some luck… destroy.
