Day Forty Five: Stubborn

I am stubborn as hell.

Most people would say this is a bad thing, but I tend to disagree. My stubbornness has made me who I am and has given me the perseverance to get through everything that has befallen me. Being stubborn is usually considered a negative trait in our culture because we only notice it when someone is being stubborn against us.

Imagine for a moment that a conversation is a kind of tug of war: the person holding the rope on the other side that refuses to give in would be considered stubborn. But so are you, and so are the people who are holding the rope with you. Standing your ground and sticking up for what you believe in isn’t a bad thing; we just don’t like it when people do it for something we disagree with.

My stubborn attitude is what gave me the strength to make it through grad school when others would have given up. Many people in my grad school did give up, but I like to think that my never-back-down attitude helped me fight through the worst two years of my academic life and allowed me to graduate on time.

Now I understand that sometimes our stubbornness can be our downfall. There isn’t a point in joining a conversation or an argument if you aren’t even going to listen to the other side. But there are some things that I reserve the right to be stubborn about. I recently spent an obnoxiously long amount of time defending my choice of religion to an acquaintance (I won’t call him a friend, because he pretty much met me once.) Because I couldn’t give him any good reason for why I was Catholic, he said I was stupid and stubborn for sticking to my religion. How the hell does it affect your life if I choose to go to church?  This is something I do for myself and nobody else gets to say whether or not I’m right. When he called me stubborn, I took it as a compliment because it made me feel strong.

I know that being stubborn as a mule in molasses is going to get me into trouble sometimes, but I won’t change who I am just to make life on the other side of the game easier for you.

Challenge to my Readers:

Examine what you are stubborn about? Get in an argument/discussion with a friend and be stubborn about your side. Halfway through, swap sides and see how stubborn they can be about yours. This game makes bar night much more fun.