Monday Morning Assembly

I don't usually pay attention in school assembly, perhaps because they have them on a Monday morning. One that did stick out was when a friend of mine was reading ‘For every compliment you receive, you will receive 3 criticisms.’ A blonde girl sitting behind me, also obviously not paying attention like me turned to her friend and whispered (all be it loudly), ‘Her nose is a weird shape’. My friend doing the reading wouldn’t have heard that criticism – at least not from the blonde girl.

Do we become thick-skinned to protect the tenderness?

I like to imagine myself thick-skinned and generally feckless. It’s easy for me to say ‘I don’t care what she thinks’, but then I was always a good actor, other parts of my life are evidence of this. Some people regard me as open, and I am – at least in the bits they see.

I get a lot of criticism, constructive and otherwise. Maybe I’ve become so accustomed to it that it barely registers. I do know that I am accused to never taking a compliment – I put it down to modesty – others say it’s low self-esteem.

It’s easiest to compliment and criticise those at a distance from us, as a way of keeping that distance there perhaps. And what of criticising ourselves? Is that keeping yourself at a distance too, to stop us becoming too involved in ourselves? Or is it just how we’ve been taught to keep ourselves ‘levelled’ – by destroying ourselves.

Criticise me today, but don’t compliment me tomorrow. My thick skin is a façade.