Acceptance: An Adventure Across Psychology’s Many Faces [Prologue]
An Introduction to my Multidisciplinary Self-Help Work
“The unexamined life is not worth living.” — Socrates
“Snow day!” my best friend Sarik Kumar shouted through my phone’s receiver, rattling me awake. I turned towards my window and squinted at its purgatorial glow. “Are you there, Sam? They JUST announced it on the news! Snow day, man! Snow day!”
Snow day.
That melodious sound filled our little 10th grade hearts with more joy than anything else possibly could. Within minutes we packed our now-liberated day with adventure: I’d walk down the hill to Sarik’s house, we’d carry our sleds to our former elementary school (the one with the giant field encircled by hills), sled for a few hours, and then come back to my house to play video games and sip hot chocolate with the little marshmallows.
Perfect.
Carrying our sleds, we were just in view of the school’s field, and to our surprise — no one was there. It was just us! We had this whole, giant field to ourselves!
For hours we raced, practicing tricks like standing on our sleds (like surfers) as they slid down. Suddenly, when Sarik and I were on opposite sides, two figures entered the field. One of them started running towards me. Unsure of what to do — but aware that running away would be difficult given the knee-high snow — I stood my ground. The figure grew closer and closer, until I knew exactly who it was — an eleventh grader, one year older than us. This was a guy many of my classmates called ‘crazy.’
Let’s call him ‘H.’
I had never really spoken to H and thus didn’t know what he wanted with me, but it didn’t matter. I knew that something bad was about to happen — maybe a fistfight, maybe worse. But I could never predict what that moment would come to signify years later.
H was only a few meters away. I knew that this was going to get physical. I felt anger well up inside me. Why do I have to get in a fight on a perfect day like this!? My muscles tensed as he smashed right into my body, flipping me down hard into the snow. Now I was furious! I rolled on my stomach to get up, but he dove on top of me — and this is where the odd part happened: As I began to lift myself up — like an awkward push-up with him on my back — I was overwhelmed with… pity.
Yes, pity.
Not puppy-pawing-at-the-window waiting to be let in during a rainstorm pity, but rather an unbearable sadness. A tearful, regretful, I-wish-I could-help-you sadness. And I had not the faintest idea why, but the pity was incapacitating.
Let me remind you that I was being attacked.
Here’s the play-by-play: H tackled me onto the ground, slid across the snow with his momentum, and then dove on top of my back while I was still flat on my stomach. As he stuffed a wad of snow down the back-collar of my jacket, I began to push myself up. With just the slightest push off the ground, I could feel him almost flying off of me. And for some reason, the fact that he felt so light scared me. For some reason, I stopped. For some reason, I let him continue punching me in the back.
For what felt like a lifetime — but was maybe only forty-five seconds — I let him pelt me as I remained on the ground, motionless.
All throughout, my mind was racing with questions: Why is he so light? Why is he so easy to move? Why does he feel so weak? Why am I letting him hit me? Why is he attacking me? What did I do? Why am I pitying someone while they’re attacking me? Why don’t I just throw him off me and beat the hell out of him if I’m stronger than him? Why don’t I try to smash his face in for attacking me like this?
Something was clearly off, and I knew it… but I didn’t know what exactly ‘it’ was. My only clue was this nauseating pity.
Eventually H got off of me, laughed, said something snarky like ‘and don’t you forget it!’ and ran back to the other figure waiting for him at the other end of the field. I wasn’t in pain, though the melting snow against my lower back was starting to burn. What was much more discomforting was that I couldn’t shake off this miserable feeling — even when I was back home, thawing at the help of hot cocoa and Sarik’s condolences, and a scalding shower. I’d been in scuffles before, but I had never felt bad for someone while they were beating me up.
Seven years later, when I was just about halfway through earning my master’s in education, I got a call from another childhood friend, Alexander. He asked if I remembered H, “that ‘crazy’ kid a grade above us.” I told Alex I did, and he told me that H had just committed suicide. He had hung himself.
I asked Alex a question that I’ve since learned to rephrase: Why did he do it?
Alexander’s answer strikes me today just as it struck me then: “You can’t live in Disney Land forever.”
Alex knew more about H than I ever did. He detailed how H continued his unhinged partying from his high school years, throughout his college years, and even into his early twenties. Before he could reach thirty “the real world was finally unavoidable,” as Alex put it.
Alex was basing this on his belief that the longer we avoid a reality the more difficult it becomes, for we further and further acclimate to our comforting delusion while our avoided truths tend to harshen over time.
I never knew H well enough to like or dislike him, but I will always wonder if the reasons behind his eventual suicide were in any way connected to the paralyzing sadness I experienced when he attacked me.
Did I sense something? Was he perhaps on drugs when he attacked me — and that’s why he felt weak? If he was on drugs, was that rooted in why he seemingly unreasonably attacked me? Was his attack just a ‘show’ and he was just desperately trying to get recognition from me, Sarik, or that mysterious figure in the distance? Was his attack an invitation to play — like dogs nipping at each other in a field — but gone awry? Was he sad about something and taking it out on me, ‘pulling his punches’ because he knew deep down that I had nothing to do with his sadness?
These spiraling questions eventually stretch into nonsensical (and unnecessarily specific) improbabilities, but still, even today, I’m left with just something.
Something about me understood that there was an avalanche of information which I could only translate into let him beat you up, Sam. It’s okay. I say this not to sound masculine or tough. There’s nothing manly about sniffling, sneezing, and shimmying back home with snow melting down your butt cheeks. There’s nothing tough about being paralyzed by what seemed only like a vague, rogue suspicion. But that’s exactly what had happened. And though this book has many, many answers and theories and ideas, it is inevitable that I will never completely understand why H attacked me, why I felt bad for him as he did, and why only a few years later he chose to end his life.
But I still think about it.
As an orphan lucky enough to be adopted, as an employee of varying careers — from serving cappuccinos in Long Island cafés to interning as an investigative journalist overseas to working in software development in Manhattan — and as a teacher who’s taught over a thousand adolescents and hundreds of college students both in New York and overseas, I find myself always returning to the same question: Why do we do what we do?
We ask this question more often than we think, though we rarely phrase it exactly as such. Turning a page of that romance novel, binge-watching that true crime documentary, or reflecting on a decision you made are all evolutions of why do we do what we do. We always want answers, justifications, closure — anything to explain the behaviors we witness, sometimes even the behaviors we ourselves commit. If you’re prone to awkward interactions, this might happen to you daily. I’ve greeted cashiers with a ‘good morning’ as the sun was setting, have responded ‘you too!’ when my taxi driver wished me a safe flight while dropping me off at the airport, and have called two of my elementary school teachers ‘mommy’. Working in education for nearly a decade, I’ve been called ‘dad’ four times. And ‘mommy’ once.
We witness otherwise intelligent people dive into dangerous relationships, friends turn against one another over trifling matters, and find ourselves having life-changing breakthroughs in the unlikeliest of moments.
Why do we do what we do?
Experts within psychology — at least the several hundred we’ll encounter within these pages — understandably focus on their area(s) of expertise: Neuroscientists will decipher heaps of information from our brain activity, social psychologists will examine the influence of our peopled environments, and psychoanalysts might help us surface the patterns and mechanisms deep below our conscious awareness. Some grapple with this question by dividing us into parts: Social psychologist Wendy Wood (1954 — Present) speaks of our ‘second self’ when discussing habit, cognitive psychologist Daniel Kahneman (1934 — Present) distinguishes our thinking into two systems, and thousands have pondered the ‘nature vs. nurture’ debate centuries before English polymath Francis Galen (1822–1911) coined the term.[i] [ii] Neuroendocronologist Robert M. Sapolsky (1957 — Present) writes perhaps the most apt description of our behavior: “It is indeed a mess.”[iii]
Why do we do what we do?
No single psychological subfield or topic can answer this question alone. But as we plunge into subjects like the subconscious, motivation, social anxiety, habit, and happiness examined through different schools within psychology we can derive some order from this mess. More importantly, perhaps we can use this ordering to help improve our lives and the lives of those around us. Perhaps we can better uplift those feeling downtrodden (who might in turn cheer up others), encourage friends who are on the verge of giving up (who might finally release their photography or that album they’ve been working on, adding more art and music to our world), and learn to more strategically prepare ourselves against life’s most challenging battles (so that we are never conclusively defeated).
And now, without further ado, let us begin our adventure across the many faces of psychology.
[i] Wood, W. (2019). Good habits, bad habits: the science of making positive changes that stick. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[ii] Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
[iii] Sapolsky, R. M. (2018). Introduction. Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst. NY, NY: Penguin Books.
Samuel Armen is an author, educator and activist. Orphaned after Armenia’s Gyumri-Spitak Earthquake in 1988 and adopted by Armenian-Americans based in New York, he makes it his life goal to give back. Currently, he divides his time between psychology research for his book (Acceptance), teaching ELA & AP English Language and Composition in the top public high school in Brooklyn, creative writing guest lectures at The Russian Armenian University in Yerevan, teaching and managing an English Creative Writing program (Project Bloom) through the Children of Armenia Fund, uplifting members of his community through digital advocacy, and publishing articles and poetry. His writing has appeared in HetQ (June — September 2011), CivilNet (2018), The Showbear Family Circus (Aug. 2020), Dreamers Creative Writing (Nov. 2020), The Raw Art Review (Winter 2020), Prometheus Dreaming (October 2021), Hey, I’m Alive Magazine (November 2021), Beyond Words Magazine (February 2022), Wingless Dreamer (February 2022), Allegory Ridge (Spring 2022), and Griffel (Spring 2022).
