COMMENTARY: ‘Lived experience’: Is it right for you?

“I’ve looked at life from my side now…”

I can imagine Joni Mitchell singing those modified lyrics every time I encounter one of today’s most grating phrases.

The phrase: “my lived experience.”

Every time some blowhard wants to identify as an expert and shut down all dissent, they appeal to their years (or months or weeks or that one time at the truck stop when the soap dispensers were almost empty) of “lived experience.”

You know the drill. (“Shut up and listen. Maybe you’ll be entitled to an opinion when you’ve shown up for your final exam in your underwear. Thank goodness I was able to flap my arms and fly away…oh, wait…that’s my dreamed experience. Well, I’m adding this embarrassing incident to my tale of constant sorrow…”)

All well and good, but it occurs to me that lived experience should involve at least a smidgen of introspection and thinking outside the box. (“I thought outside the box one time and it gave me an ice cream headache. End of story.”)

Seriously, a five-year-old child’s lived experience might be that his parents hate him, because they make him eat his vegetables and adhere to a regular bedtime. Oops. (“And my almost-died experience happened when I ran away from home to join the circus…”)

Brevity is the soul of wit, as Shakespeare’s Polonius observed in “Hamlet.” Brevity is also the soul of leaving out all the pesky, incriminating details of how you got into a mess in the first place, I’ve learned.

Some of the “lived experience” people are entirely too modest about their talent for blending a smoothie made of equal parts objective fact and self-serving perception. (“There was an obvious vibe that the manager wanted to humiliate me, even if he was three floors below in a lead-lined vault.”)

They assert themselves confidently, but always with a healthy dose of humility. (“Now, I’m not saying I’m the hero of my story…but when the landlord hassled me about six months’ back rent, I wielded my trusty sword Excalibur and…”)

To their credit, they are always empathetic to the ignorance of their listeners. “You don’t know what it’s like to be me,” is the cheerful warble. Maybe I’m just a curmudgeon, but I have to bite my tongue when listening to them, so I don’t blurt out, “Hey, you’re not me, so how do you know what I know and don’t know?”

And maybe the rest of us are being too judgmental when we accuse the aggrieved person of playing the victim card. (“I am not playing the victim card! It was bad. No one would help me. Not Colonel Mustard, not Prof. Plum, not Mrs. Peacock…”)

I can understand these folks being miffed by unsolicited advice. “Nobody knows what’s better for me than me” is the mantra.

“I’m not saying the world owes me a living — just another roll of duct tape to cover this irregularly shaped mole that popped up during the second Obama inauguration…”

Still, let’s all display some self-awareness and find a new phrase to beat to death.

I’ve looked at my column from both sides now — as the author and from the perspective of the reader who gets to line the garbage can with it.

And I’m jealous. Wait — are those Brussels sprouts? Never mind. I’m happy to be me and happy to be tracking down the Ringling Brothers…

Danny Tyree welcomes email responses at tyreetyrades@aol.com and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades.”