I outlined in a previous post how the student-club where I hang out with friends tends to deal with people who just don’t ‘fit in,’ typically due to behavioral issues, in a sort of cycle. To save you the click,
-The person comes in and rather than sit and watch what’s on the screen, will attempt to strike up loud or unrelated conversation. (If it’s not a ‘noise’ issue we’re dealing with, it can be generalized as something we just find disagreeable.)
-They are asked to please quiet down or leave the room if it‘s really bad. This may happen multiple times before a Warning occurs.
-Feeling like the people who issue the Warning (typically one of the top three officers of the club) are ‘mean‘ or ‘unfair,’ the person being Warned will sit in the back of the room and complain to anyone who will listen about how rude and hateful we are.
-The person being Warned will continue to attend the club, every week, and continue to complain from the back, or carry on having loud conversations or being distracting, and receiving warnings.
-Tension will eventually reach a head, and the person is confronted by our ‘Warden’ - aka, the Officer responsible for dealing with people who are being a constant bother.
-The person storms out and may return at a later date, more subdued, or not at all - though they may continue to complain about us outside of the group.
By this point, we‘ve encountered this cycle enough times that we’ve learned to spot escalation coming pretty early on. Our major concern with any problematic member is to give them as many chances as they can to redeem themselves if they’re being disagreeable and try to avoid confrontation - the last thing we want is to cause people to leave a group where the goal is to just hang out and have a good time.
In any case where we’re having issues with someone, while we may feel bad about having to deal with someone who shouts, swears or threatens to report us to Student Life (for what exactly? Enforcing our rules?), how do we deal with someone who’s only real fault is trying too hard to be friendly?
The current issue is with a guy we’ll call Joe.
Joe attends club weekly, occasionally contributes, participates in our card and tabletop games, and is generally an agreeable member of the club. However, a certain level of ‘awkward’ has occurred.
Given that the majority of the group are also friends, we’ll do food runs together (usually cramming as many people into one or two cars as we can) or hanging out before or after club at one of our houses. These things aren’t official club activities - we go on food runs when we’re hungry, and carpool because we’re all chummy. We hang out together after because once club is over, we like to just hang out together as friends.
Joe is familiar by face to maybe one or two of us outside of club. The rest of us know nothing about him, who he is, what he’s like outside of school, etc: for all intents and purposes, Joe is a stranger. A really friendly stranger - and it‘s kind of weird.
I realized we might have some issues a couple weeks back when Joe brought in a tray of brownies for no particular reason. It’s not unusual for one of us to bring a thing of Oreos or something to share with people in the room - but Joe’s brownies went largely untouched.
“Huh - no one’s really eating the brownies,” he commented to me while I worked nearby.
Uncomfortably aware that if I or someone else from the group had brought them in that they'd already be gone, I replied: “…I guess we’re just not really brownie people.”
I couldn’t help but think of the significance of breaking bread together in a group, and how the sharing of food indicates friendship, or at least amicability - and how in most cultures, generally refusing to share food with someone indicates a poor relationship at best. I noted that people picked at the brownies (mostly when Joe wasn‘t in the room, as though they were subconsciously avoiding appearing friendly to him), but that the tray was left - for the most part - untouched up until he left for the evening. At that point, the brownies got wrapped up and eaten later by various people.
I don't think this was hostile behavior - it just came back down to the whole thing of Joe not really being friends with any of us, but trying to act as though he was.
In simplest terms, I think Joe just makes many of us uneasy because of how familiar he tries to act with us, despite none of us being familiar with him. He’s uncanny, or as Freud might have said, unheimliche.
My personal experience with him is limited: if I don’t particularly take to someone, I just kind of ignore them. This got difficult during our last club meeting, however, when he moved in beside where I’d set up my laptop to work, and started touching my things.
“Do you mind if I look at this?” He asked. I glanced to see what he was indicating, and saw that he meant my date book (Llewellyn's 2011 Witches' Datebook) where I write little reminders regarding work and certain dates, and shrugged. “Sure.” I turned back and went to work.
He started to flip through casually and then went “Oh - never mind.” he set it back down. “I thought it would have spells or instructions or something, I didn’t read the back all the way, I just saw the title and assumed.”
“…Yeah, it’s just my agenda. It’s got historical dates and what-not noted in it, but it’s not a spell book.”
I turned back to my work.
He chuckled. “I wonder if hippies realize how much of their bullshit is half-assed plagiarism from my people.”
I turned sharply to face him again, taken completely aback. “Your people?” A chaotic storm of thoughts raced through my mind. Was he saying I was a ‘hippie’ (which his tone indicated was meant poorly) plagiarizing from other cultures, which he claimed were his own? Was he assuming the date book indicated that I was some sort of New Age newbie buying into what he called ‘bullshit’? And just who was he claiming were ‘his people’?
“Yeah, you know The Wickerman? That was based on My People. It was supposed to be one of the most brutal traditions in Europe…” As he went on (repeating the word “brutal“ multiple times, smiling all the while), my mind continued racing. Did he realize that the supposed ‘Wickerman’ burnings were largely only documented by Romans, with the intention of spreading rumors and enforcing negative, sensationalist stereotypes about the Celts and Gauls as part of their political agendas? Did he know that the only well-known serious documentation on this method of sacrifice came from Julius Ceaser, who based his comment on the ‘tradition’ on hearsay? Did Joe realize that no other classical writer made reference to this method of sacrifice? Did he realize that in ancient times, ‘brutal’ punishment for crimes such as thievery and murder might have seemed appropriate, but that seemingly bragging about being descended from people who would burn criminals and war captives in celebratory bonfires made him look kind of crazy?
The conversation petered out, and he went off to interact with someone else while I tried to figure out what his deal was. Off handed insult or no, really he hadn’t insulted me - he has no idea who I am or what I do. All he had done was made me wonder whether or not he’d ever bothered to seriously research his inheritance, and whether or not he considered it somehow ‘cool’ that his ancestors may have burned people alive as part of a fertility rite.
Though no one had been listening in on our exchange, when he announced he was going on a food run, the group discomfort surfaced again as not a single person asked to go along, a few commenting out loud that they weren’t hungry - though after he left, many got up and left on their own food run, together. My mind went back for the second time to the significance of breaking bread and sharing salt with others.
When he came back, he started flipping through the notebook I had beside me (I keep a notebook for practicing calligraphy) and picking up and examining my pens. I didn’t comment, but continued wondering: did he know that it was rude to just handle people’s things without asking? Did he assume that my general silence towards him meant that I might not be disagreeable with his behaviors and actions?
As I’ve said, I prefer to stay silent in the face of personal and non-physical antagonism rather than start something up and have other people feel bad. If this was going to turn into an issue, mine would not be the hand that pushed it there - my thinking was that Joe is just kind of awkward, a little over-friendly, and again - unheimliche. I gave brief answers to his questions about calligraphy, trying to make it clear that I wasn’t interested in conversation. He left me feeling weird.
I had managed to shake off this weird feeling up until I was talking to another of our group and made the comment that I’d made an infographic about Tarot for Beginners. Joe jumped into the conversation with “Tarot isn’t that hard to figure out if you think about it.”
I stared at him, and tried to choose my words carefully before responding. I was sure it was unintentional, and largely my imagination, but it seemed like he was, again, trying to provoke a reaction with his tone.
“…I know. But a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that Tarot is supposed to tell the future or something, when the whole point is to figure out options for yourself.”
He made an almost non-sequitur comment about the symbology of the cards, and I agreed, saying “Right - the whole point is to use the cards for self-improvement through introspection.”
"I thought you said the point is to get different perspectives.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh, sorry - that’s not what I heard. I heard ‘introspection.’” I stared at him again, trying to determine if he was being actively argumentative, if I really needed to explain that anything you interpret out of Tarot comes from inside oneself (if at any point you think that the cards are actually talking to you as a separate entity, seek help), if I should explain the definition of introspection (a reflective looking inward : an examination of one's own thoughts and feelings) or if it was really worth it to get flustered over semantics with this guy. Deciding it really wasn’t worth the time and energy, I just shook my head and went back to picking my things up since it was nearing time to leave, the voice of my father speaking from the back of my mind: “This guy is some sort of dipstick.”
As the rest of the group began cleaning up, Joe stuck around longer than usual. The week before, he’d tried to invite himself along by asking one of our number where we were headed, and been denied. This week, he went straight to the one who’s house we were headed to.
“Do you mind if I come over?” He asked. Uncomfortable and unsure (remember that Joe isn‘t actually a friend, much less and acquaintance, with any of us), he directed Joe to talk to two others of our group. Joe found them and asked if he could follow behind their cars since he didn’t know the way himself.
The more tactful of the two said something along these lines -
“…I personally don’t know you very well and wouldn’t feel comfortable inviting you to my house, so I’m going to say no.”
The other just replied “Absolutely not.”
Dejected and denied for the second time, Joe left for his own vehicle.
Unable to just mentally ‘drop’ how I felt (uncomfortable) with the I’m-right-you’re-wrong way Joe had tried speaking to me earlier, I finally asked the others how they felt: to my mixed relief and worry, the feeling was unanimous: Joe makes us uncomfortable, but none of us can really define exactly what it is.
Which leaves us in our current predicament: how do we deal with someone who isn’t bad in any real way, but makes us all uneasy?
I decided to try a little introspection via Tarot and see if I couldn’t divine some sort of answer.
I used a personally designed spread for determining the best and worst outcomes of decisions around a situation, where card position translates to this:
1) The Querrant (Asker)
2) The situation/Tone of the issue
3) Obstacles
4) Subconscious motivations of the querrant
5) Conscious motivations of the querrant
6) Best possible Outcome
7) Worst possible Outcome
The different options are shown as roman numerals - here, I and II.
Here, the cards said:
(1) 10 of Pentacles (reversed): Poverty, discontent in the world, discontent or discomfort in a situation regarding friends and family.
(2) The Lovers (reversed): a split, or a bad relationship - a poor fit, enmity, a relationship that just doesn’t work or results in enemies.
(3) Temperance, as an obstacle - trying to mix oil and water, trying to make mix opposites to make a stronger whole. In this position, it seemed to indicate that this mixture just isn’t going to work.
(4) The Queen of Cups (reversed): Normally a card reflecting a calm, serene woman who is a font of forgiveness and love - reversed, someone who is over emotional yet withholds that same forgiveness and compassion offered by her righted self.
(5) The Page of Cups: someone who wants to offer a helping hand, especially in regards to new endeavors or journeys.
This all felt true. As the Querrant, I was being shown as being discontent in the worldly situation of my friends as they struggle with their discomfort with Joe. The situation depicts a bad fit with our group, and the obstacle to resolving this ‘problem’ is that we’re trying to just allow Joe to mix with us but, well, we just don’t mix. The depiction of my subconscious self struck a cord, and reminded me that I need to take a step back and keep calm: I have seen nothing to indicate that Joe is an inherently bad guy. I just have no desire to be friends with him myself. The page of cups spoke to my conscious desire for everyone to just be happy, and get where they belong.
So what about the choices?
I) Someone in the group takes him aside and speaks frankly with him about his behavior/we intentionally push to the confrontation part of the ‘cycle.’
II) We continue to attempt ignoring our collective feelings of unease and try to just get along.
(I)
6) Best Outcome: five of swords (reversed) - success, victory and joy. In its normal position, this card is about defeat and dejection, and learning humility - reversed, this card seems to say that if someone does get stern with him and we make it clear how we feel as a group, things will be good for us.
7) Worst Outcome: Eight of wands - hope, felicity, new arrivals, and news. This seemed to say that in the worst scenario, things will improve anyhow, be it in a change in Joe’s behavior or someone taking his place.
(II)
6) Best Outcome: Six of wands (reversed) - treachery, defeat, fear and discomfort: ignoring our unease and just letting it grow will flip our typically celebratory moods upside-down and turn it into fear and unease, as of that of an enemy at the gate.
7) Worst Outcome: Ten of Wands - an oppressive burden, having to deal with so much that it blinds you from the good things in life.
The cards don’t tell the future, but these seem like realistic expectations regarding the potential outcomes of the two choices I examined, but that’s assuming Joe even comes back for next week’s club meeting. I guess that I have to wait, watch, and see what I can do to dispel the feeling of unheimliche shared by the group regarding Joe, and make everyone feel a little more at home.
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