For example, this model, though I personally have seen it in German, English, translated it into Chinese, did not help me at all understand what Mr. Mean Comments was thinking when he asked me to write in any human language while I was obviously using English. I was trying, as many other students would do, to understand what the hidden message behind those piercing words was. I sometimes even took it, not without sarcasm, as a real life practice of Derrida’s theory of writing, of the death of the author (with this term of course I was playing with the pun and cursing him at the same time). 

I finally realized, during a facebook conversation with one of the fellow graduate students in my institute, that the best thing to survive-- or persist with your stance-- is not to see the whole thing as a conflict, but as a missed process of communication, or more radical-- a process of negotiation.

Use Mr. Mean Comments as an example.

I don’t need anymore to win over Mr. Mean Comments, either in terms of his favorite master thesis nor in terms of a good score to my master thesis. I want to finish my project and that’s it, period. I am not going to ignite a fire just because I can’t satisfy his endless pursuit of quality. I am going to let go of it and be clear about what I want and need. So that’s my ABC now:

1. State clear your goal

2. Hear from the other side

3. Decide together how to proceed

But Mr. Mean Comments is never so easy. He never responds to any of my questions or mails. The only thing he did was proofreading my drafts and giving destructive critiques. So I decide to add one more principle:

4. Don’t show emotional breakouts.......

For the last one, I was thinking if I should send him an email, confronting him and telling him that he shouldn’t bully me anymore with his words or I WON’T LET YOU BULLY ME WITH YOUR WORDS ANYMORE all in big letters. I had one particular vivid dream about it and in the dream, I did’t dare to log into my email account to see his response...

So there should be another principle: