Society's Expectation to Be "Nice"

My mother-in-law had a very brilliant mind. She wasn't your traditional woman. My husband just described her as more of an Arya Stark character. She taught me all sorts of things, and I was fascinated by her. She was a very unusual woman in a time when people were much more homogenous than they are today.

One of the most profound things she ever said to me was, "What's so great about nice? Nice is just nice." I ran that around in my mind. Cause to 19 or 20-year-old me in the early 2000s, well, nice was everything! This was before the internet was really really taking hold and we had this rapid exchange of ideas that we have today and this exploration of gender roles had gained any momentum. I thought well, nice isn't kind. It's not caring. It's not joy. It's not great. It's just "nice." Nice is so middle of the road. If you tell someone that they have a nice blouse, that blouse isn't beautiful or fun or fancy or unique. It's just "nice." It's not ugly. It's just above the criteria of something that's not nice, but it's not extraordinary.

And yet we're all expected to always be "nice." I've been rolling my mother's-in-law quote around for some 17 years. She's been dead for ten. It's become a main premise in my life. I'm at a place now where I look around me and I see "nice" as chains. I see people suffocating themselves because it's not acceptable to not be nice. My husband doesn't get the profundity of it. But he's a man. Men have a different set of rules they have to live by. But women have to be nice.

I just told my close friend what my mother-in-law said about being nice, and it was extraordinary to watch what happened in her eyes as all these lights went off inside of her. I know my mother-in-law, who is one of my greatest teachers, was there experiencing that moment, too.

I'm sitting here reconciling feelings of shame and guilt because I'm not feeling at all "nice" these days. There's something great roaring inside of me as I decide more and more strongly to stand for what I want in life and nothing less. There's nothing nice about that. As a Kundalini yogi, I have a lot of energy running through me, and therefore the emotions I feel are intense. There's nothing nice about that. At this point I'm at in my life right now it's hard for me to engage in polite light conversation. There's just too much intensity going on inside me. So I've been alone with myself mostly. Because if you're going to be around people you have to be "nice," don't you? I had a tea date with three lovely ladies this morning. The first time I've really socialized for a little while. I'm uncomfortable because I know I wasn't "nice" and positive. It wasn't in me, sorry. And I just don't have it in me to wear faces. I'm feeling that I was not an acceptable human because I wasn't "nice." I think that my friends must be judging me and finding me unacceptable.

Society did that to us from the early days. Be accommodating. Make other people feel comfortable. And if we didn't, I suppose we were shamed for that. And then we internalize that shame and turn it around at ourselves. Later today, even as I sat there with my close friend yelling and expressing all the intense feelings I was feeling, I felt I needed to stop. I was being a burden to her. And then I told her that I was feeling that and we had a moment of recognition that we could have something very special together if we don't have to do that and we don't have to be "nice." I'm grateful for the people with whom I don't have to be nice. And maybe we can stop this judging of people for not being nice and wearing the society mask. Maybe we can start to see a beauty in the depths of what goes on in being a human. Maybe we can start to recognize that this "nice" business is like chains. Caring is deliberate. Kindness is deliberate. Nice sucks.

When I was in my early twenties I worked in a real estate office with my mom. Both of us were assistants to realtors, and our offices were right next to each other. Her boss was a pig. She dealt with sexual harassment on the regular. So one day I walked right up to him and told him that if I heard him talk to my mom like that again I would sue him for sexual harassment so fast his head would spin. My mom still brings this up to me when I tell her that I'm trying to stand up for myself in life. She laughs and says "I don't think you have a problem with that." I perceive that behind that sentence is, "The audacity of you to do that. It wasn't nice. Nice girls don't do that."

Today when I was confiding in my friend she said, "You both have strong personalities." And I felt shame because a strong personality isn't "nice."

Nice also doesn't give us the permission to shine. How many of us are afraid to shine because it's not "nice?" What if we outshine others? Would you agree that it feels like there's a little bit of an audacity to shine? Think about it, breaking outside of "nice," is frowned upon in all directions. "Nice" says you can only be ordinary, never extraordinary.

How many of us are willing to experiment with feelings like fierceness and anger or frustration and to then express that to other people?

My mother-in-law wasn't at all nice. She was quite odd, really. She thought all sorts of weird out there stuff. She liked to think. And she was good at it. She would devise elaborate plans to get things for people. She had a bold, unique laugh. She smoked lots of weed. She lounged around in dresses that were fifteen years outdated. She put no effort into her appearance. She wasn't feminine. She wasn't masculine either. She listened. Intensely. She was also very flawed. She died a horrific and miserable death of Pancreatic cancer resisting death in fear all the way to the end as she wasted away and died in her 50s. I imagine it must have been an incredible burden to not be "nice" in a time when our society was so much more restrictive than it is today.

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