The Last Person I Expected to Relate With

In my last post I wondered what form the inevitable parallels between my life and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest would take, I even speculated that I might find a Nurse Ratched in my life. Well, I have realized that there is a Nurse Ratched in my life, and she is me. I have begun to see disturbing similarities between us, which is odd because I really don't think I'm the evil villain type. Of course, I don't think the similarities are really in areas of villainy, they are instead in the area of obsession with procedure. For example, in Kesey's novel Nurse Ratched maintains a rigid schedule for the patients; they are not allowed to break from it even to watch a baseball game. A reasonable person would have allowed the patients to make a one-time deviation and enjoy the game instead of turning it into an enormous power struggle with implications reaching beyond that afternoon. But Nurse Ratched is not a reasonable person, she has a very specific vision of how people should behave and what rules they should follow, she simply cannot tolerate interruptions to this vision and she overreacts when they occur. This is where I see myself in her, I have spent the last few days cycling between annoyance and rage because of a school project. The other people involved did not follow instructions and they had a very flippant attitude about the whole project. Somehow, my annoyance about this quickly escalated into a state of fury that occupied my thoughts for days; I talked about it constantly, which I am sure was very annoying to my friends. But yesterday evening I realized I was being ridiculous, I was fuming over procedural violations to a project which, clearly, no one really cares about except for me. Like Nurse Ratched, I cling to rules and procedures and I overreact when others do not take them as seriously as I do. Unlike Nurse Ratched, I would certainly not employ electroshock therapy to punish rule breakers, so the similarities end there. But I still need to be careful of this flaw because, as I demonstrated this week, it can cause me unnecessary stress and it makes me rather bad company.

 An image of Nurse Ratched from the 1975 film adaptation