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| My original Lego pirate (with a replacement hat) |
There was a story that a friend told me once that I never
managed to quite grasp the significance of until earlier this year. Lego helped
me to understand it, as strange as that sounds. I’ll explain the Lego side of
things before I tell you what it helped me understand. And yes I am well aware
of how ridiculous and abstract this story will sound because I’m an adult going
on about how a very specific niche like Lego affects my feelings.
See, what happened to me was that because I grew up poor,
I didn’t have any Lego until I was about 10 and we moved to Australia. The Lego
I did have then were the smallest sets then available, the only “luxury” toys mum
could afford. I loved Lego as a concept, I loved the minifigures (that’s the
little Lego people), I loved the stories I could make with them, the adventures
the minifigures could go on, etc. I even held onto one of my original pirate
minifigures until now, about 25 years on. As a kid I played with him and as an
adult I carried this little guy around on a keyring for a long time – until I
lost his hat, then I decided it was safer to put him on a shelf and get more
Lego. But then as an adult I became hesitant to spend money on “toys”.
In about 2011, after I left my hospital job, I started to
earn more reasonable money. Now, when you’ve been poor growing up you can then become
a very frugal person. That’s what happened to me. One day I was in a store with
a good friend and I was eyeing off some Lego. She said to me “why do you keep
looking at it? If you can afford it, get it”. But I couldn’t bring myself to do
it. I was hesitant to "waste" money. Geez, there’s people even poorer
than my family was and they can’t afford basic things, so how can I bring
myself to splurge on something so non-essential to life, a luxury? But my
friend supported me, she could see how badly I wanted the Lego (and yes I was
at this stage nearly 30 years old) and yet how much it troubled me to spend
money on myself for non-essential things. She convinced me that it’s OK to enjoy
life and the things I like. And so I allowed myself permission to spend on Lego.
And I developed a true love and passion for it! I mean greater enthusiasm than
I had as a child; greater than I think children are actually capable of (if you
meet any true adult Lego fan your first thought will be ‘what a weirdo, this is
a kid’s toys’, but your second thought will be ‘wow, this guy really really
LOVES Lego’). It's crazy but I felt so passionate for all things Lego, and I wanted
to learn everything about them and just enjoy them as much as I could. If you
know me, you probably have at some point received from me photos of a Lego set
and saying something like "the guys who designed these sets are absolute
geniuses!" Needless to say, I soon came to own a fair amount of Lego,
though I only get the sets I feel something for.
Recently I met someone else who claimed to like Lego
though didn’t own any as an adult. I did as my friend had done with me and
normalized it for her, told her it’s OK to have Lego as an adult – just like I
had. Well, what happened was that suddenly she started buying Lego, copious
amounts of Lego. Making decisions to buy entire series of Lego without first
even knowing what individual sets came within that series, what the cost was, without
any care for individual sets or figures, just a determination that all must be
owned. That’s when I started to become uneasy with her. Because to me Lego (at
an adult fan level) is about passion, and she was treating it purely as a
possession. The crux of my thought was that she was treating my passion without respect. And yet I
remained fully aware of how petty my unease sounded if I ever voiced it to
anyone, except maybe another adult fan of Lego.
My unease peaked when this woman started buying a Lego
series known as Modular buildings, a series designed by the Lego group
specifically in response to adult fans of Lego. See, the thing is that to me as
an amateur adult fan of Lego owning any of the sets in the Modular series is
the ultimate prize, the big reward. And she bought them the same as one buys a
$2 piece of junk you just want to have in your house. And as pathetic as this
sound, that kind of hurt me. It's weird, but it was like stepping on my toes!
It hurt me that someone who’s new to this, who doesn't share the lifelong
passion for Lego, just goes and basically buys my dreams! And with full
awareness that this will make me sound even more pathetic, I mourned. I felt
like I had to mourn my dreams. I can't own the modulars now. How can I
"treat" myself to or call a prize something that to this woman was
seen like just a simple "thing"? I had to mourn that I will now never
own a modular set. I don't want to share with her something that to her means
nothing.
Anyhow, so recently (actually not that recent, I have
been sitting on this story a few months because I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s
feelings), I told this story to the friend who originally convinced me to get
into Lego again as an adult. She’s often my confidante and knows me more than
most people. And I said to her, “I am being ridiculous, right? Tell me I am
being silly feeling so hurt because this other woman didn’t respect my passion;
tell me this isn’t as big as I’m making out to be”. And, yes, at first she
laughed, but mostly because she said to me ‘so you now get why the story I told you about what happened to me and my
job affected me so much?’ And, yes, I remembered; yes, I finally understood
something about her I hadn’t fully understood until then. And, yes, it also
eclipsed what I felt because her story actually involved people’s careers and
overall life journey. I feel I have to tell you this story so you also
understand why my Lego story affected me so (in case you still can’t get over
the fact that I am talking about Lego, and, yes, Lego is marketed as a stupid
children’s toy).
My friend worked 10 years towards becoming an ambulance
officer. It was her dream job. Every job she had before that was in preparation
for it. In fact, by the time she started working this job she was possibly
overqualified. Her partner knew very well that this ambulance job was the dream
she had been working towards all along. Then one day, her partner realised that
he was miserable in his own job, and came home and told my friend that he was
going to join the ambulance service. Just like that. He never had a real
interest in it. Then suddenly, my friend who is more giving than she is capable
of self-preservation, realised that her partner had taken her goal and made it
his. But not in the way couples do when a goal becomes a shared goal like
keeping the relationship together or caring for children or growing a joint
financial investment, etc. It was more like my friend’s dream was cast aside –
and it quickly became, not her partner’s dream, but his “must-have”.
So, when I told my friend the Lego story between me and
this other friend she said to me “I see how you feel like you were stepped on.
I know what it feels like to have someone almost steal your passion from you.
But not for the right reasons. Not because you actually share that passion.
That's different. But when it's more of a 'Yeah, I can do that!’ Or ‘I can get
that too!.. And I can do even better and go the whole way’” My friend
eventually realised how her partner’s thought pattern and behaviour didn’t just
apply to the jobs they did, but more generally. How other aspects of his
personality and his willingness to “step on her toes”, his must-have nature,
didn’t just extend to just work. And my friend became resentful of him without
even realising it. She realised though that her partner did not understand her
at all, and that this whole incident had caused her to lose part of herself
when her partner became an ambulance officer. They’re not together anymore. So, she
said, she gets how deeply hurtful my experience with my friend is because it is
somewhat similar to what she went through. And they thing is she had told me
her story before, but only now did I get
it. Because I had now felt perhaps only a small proportion of what she felt for
a long time.
There's passion. And then there's possession. And it’s hard
to respect someone who will step over your passions to claim a possession for
themselves.
