Conflict Isn't Contention, A Love Letter to Elle

March 14, 2021 by Marissa Compton

When I was seventeen, I took a mediation class, and I had to write a paper about a conflict I was in and analyze it using the theories we’d been learning. This professor was a family friend. I’d known him for years. We went to the same potlucks. We ran into him at Costco. He knew my family. So when I told him I wanted to write about my sister for the paper, he laughed and said, “How could anyone be in conflict with Elle?”

I pointed at him. “Exactly.”

If you don’t have the benefit of knowing Elle, I’m sorry. She has freckles and blue eyes that I absolutely covet. She is magic with little kids and pets. She likes puns and indie pop and clothes and immigration studies. Her first words were “no thank you,” as in we’d say, “Elle, time to go to bed” and she’d say, “No thank you.” I’ve known her her entire life, and she’s never been anything but delightful.

At the time, Elle was twelve. She was known for being happy and sweet, neither of which were very good reflections of the complexity of her personhood. (To this day, one of the fastest ways to make Elle upset is to call her sweet.) Professor Ford couldn’t imagine anyone getting on her bad side, because he couldn’t imagine her having a bad side. He couldn’t imagine us being in conflict, and that was the “exactly,” because we weren’t in conflict. We were almost never in conflict. That was the problem.

If You Can't Say Something Nice

February 21, 2021 by Marissa Compton

When I was twenty-one one of my friends told me, “Risa, people don’t know you like them. They can’t tell. You don’t show them.”

Nate was my roommate Shelley’s boyfriend (hi Nate! Hi Shelley!) who had decided to adopt me as a little sister. (“But I’m older than you,” I told him when he informed me of his decision. “That’s OK,” he said, “I’m taller.”) He read my essays, forced me to watch bad actions movies, and coached me in my complete lack of a social life. He was one of my best friends, and he was sitting at my kitchen table, calmly informing me that most people kind of thought I didn’t like them.

I was a little devastated by the thought. I’m a Hufflepuff, meaning (as I explained to my therapist during one of our first visits, all the while saying, “You should really read Harry Potter”) that I am driven forward by relationships, by contact and closeness. By twenty-one I’d shut down the sun-shiny friendliness my mom insists I was born with, but I’d maintained the bounding enthusiasm in the existence of almost everyone around me. I figured that, being as great as they were, they were working off the assumption that I liked them. I didn’t need to go out of my way to communicate it.

Power and Control

January 31, 2021 by Marissa Compton

Austin gets grumpy during the semi-annual Sunday school lessons about the difference between joy and happiness, the ones in which we’re instructed to seek after “joy” (which is true and long-lasting) rather than “happiness” (which is fleeting and worldly). I think what actually bothers him is the repetition paired with the expectation that we pretend that this discussion is new to us, but what he usually says is, “They just made that up! I could have said happiness is lasting and joy is fleeting! That difference is pretend!”

This is obviously true—as we’ve discussed before, all words are made up distinctions, and they get especially slippery around any God talk. But here I am. About to do this same thing.

Power isn’t control. Power is actually control’s opposite. And I know these words are slippery and the distinctions are a line in the sand but, as we’ve discussed before, sometimes a line in the sand is all I’ve got. So let me draw the line a little deeper and offer the definition of control I’m working on: I mean absolute control. I mean control like the ability to make something happen, to determine the outcome. Control is a zero sum game—the more that one person has, the less that another has.