Right Answers

Some thoughts on self respect

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

Joan Didion, On Self-Respect

In college, my boss - technically my boss’s boss - came to see his daughter and invited me to have dinner with them. I didn’t know him very well, but I really liked him. He felt a lot more human and honest - vulnerable maybe - than the other people I’d worked for. Despite that, the evening was one of my worst nights in college.

I’d only met G a handful of times in the office during my internship. The first time, I didn’t know who he was, but understood that he was important by the way the energy shifted in the room when he entered. My immediate boss, normally fluid and self-assured, had become tense and borderline sycophantic, fully attuned to him and almost tripping over himself to carry the interaction. 

G didn’t seem to demand it though. In fact, he downplayed it – and lightly, so not to leave anyone feeling embarrassed.

It’s a strange thing, trying to be genuine in a relationship with someone whose approval you fully depend on. But he toed the line well: he invited you to be honest and to drop formality, but wouldn’t let personal dislike get in the way of working together. You’d probably never know if he disliked you.

A dinner like this tends to hang over me in the days (sometimes weeks) leading up to it. The night of, as I counted down the minutes before he arrived to pick me up, I’d paced around my apartment, doing deep breathing and making myself as large as I could in the mirror — it had been going around at the time as a tip to boost confidence before interviews.

We were in the car going to pick up his daughter. I’d significantly overdressed. I hope I hadn’t gotten into the backseat from the start - knowing me, some misplaced gesture of humility - but I remember sitting there as we waited for his daughter and her friend in the lot outside their dorm. The silences between G’s friendly overtures were taut, completely owing to me, and I knew it. I was on high alert as if defending from attack; looking for the signals to tell me what to do - which posture to assume, which module to engage – and working to do it with a convincing air of ease and warmth. It always felt like people could see right through me.

Why was I doing this? I liked this guy! I’ve always cared a lot about being honest with people; I could see the narrow shortsightedness of ‘getting ahead’ with approval won through dishonesty, whether socially or professionally. This wouldn’t have even affected my employment, not even if I’d come off like a total ass. But it wasn’t about any of that.

His daughter got in the car and the conversation shifted to what she was thinking about studying. I remembered that he had this test he liked to give people: in that first time I’d encountered him, he’d invited me to brag about my major during a brief conversation in view of the rest of my team. “Wow, you studied math, difficult subject” There’d been a softness to the probe - he was testing me, but it wasn’t clear I’d be firmly ruled out of his good graces if I failed. I’d somehow parried it successfully - I said I’d probably have studied economics if I hadn’t nearly had to drop out of Econ 101. 

This time I failed. He’d gestured at the platitude that no major was harder or more rigorous than another in an absolute sense; some things were harder for some people, it was all relative and subjective. I’m not entirely sure why - it happened without much thought - but when he asked me if I thought so too, I was honest. I said that I definitely preferred problem sets to struggling with an essay, so it was true to an extent; but that the time commitment of, for instance, some of the engineering students I knew was insane: I’d seen their schedules and they had entire days blocked out with class and labs, and several hours of homework each night on top of it. 

I’m not sure it was really about being honest - maybe in part - but rather about fearing seeming servile, too agreeable. There was a slight hiccup in the conversation but nothing major.

As we walked to the restaurant, a hip Mexican place and one of my favorites, I balled up my sweater and untucked my shirt to try to look a little less formal. I’d been here a few times before, and recognized our waitress. My heart sank a bit - I didn’t want to interact with her in front of G. 

She was always a bit sharp and standoffish, jaded by the demand to perform friendliness to customers, most of whom were college boys trying to flirt with her. She was about our age, and was very attractive; she seemed annoyed that it was the case. I imagined I was better than the other guys, but I was playing more or less the same game, just with a different strategy; and the added layer of deception probably made me more odious to her than they were.

Why didn’t she like me? What was I doing wrong? In retrospect, it was merely my attention; the fact that I cared at all whether she liked me. She just wanted to be left alone. Unfortunately, it was like a finger trap: the most annoyed she seemed, the more my attention would move to her, only to further annoy her. But none of that was clear to me then.

It was made better by the fact that we were four at the table - less need to interact directly with her. It was Halloween and she was wearing cat ears. I saw an opening; maybe I could finally get out of this weird dynamic with her: “nice costume by the way, much better than his,” I said, making a slight gesture over to a waiter who had taken a dish towel and put it over his head with wayfarer sunglasses. But she’d have none of it: “do you know what it is?” she said, her eyes turning to the rest of the table a hair too quickly before I’d answered no. “Old devil,” she said, pulling out her hair which she’d dyed gray; up close I could see the cat ears were actually devil horns.

I hadn’t yet learned that when a person is signaling for you to back the fuck off, you probably should rather than trying to coerce them to like you.

The rest of dinner had gone well. I’m a good listener, and was able to keep my discomfort and anxiety mostly hidden. I’d asked G in a sidebar conversation about his son, and he’d spoken about him with a warmth and guileless pride that felt genuine. I’d seen a lot of the fake kind – empathy and emotional depth had become ascendant virtues even in business – but his didn’t seem to demand anything from me the way theirs did.

After dinner we’d gone to an art exhibit hosted by one of the local hotels. Few things surface pretensions and insecurities like art - not that G was trying to. 

As we walked there, he’d asked me how I was feeling - ostensibly a question about my health issues, which he’d known about - but I gathered he was asking because something seemed off. I was glad to be able to provide an alternative explanation for my behavior. I hated for people to think my discomfort was about them - that was always the worst part of it by far.

I wasn’t sure how to act in the gallery. I’d been socialized well around dinners with my parents’ friends so things like that came more easily, but this was fairly new to me. I’d forced conversation, for instance pressing for gossipy details as the rest of the group tried to be delicate about a woman who’d drunkenly passed out in the bathroom. G was reluctant, but out of his uncommon and increasingly undeserved kindness, gentle and almost deferential, he whispered to me as little as he could to sate my curiosity.

This wasn’t me - fuck - but I just didn’t know what else to do, and felt immense pressure to do something, be something. And it just kept building on itself the more I felt like I was failing, a vicious cycle, and I stopped being able to think.

At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

I remember this one exhibit in particular, a grid of metal boxes taking up most of a wall hanging under the title The Last Real Men. The boxes each had a name on the front, mostly celebrities. You’d read a few and begin to get a sense for what the artist might have had in mind - “Quentin Tarantino” “Clint Eastwood” “James Dean” - only to come across a name that didn’t fit the pattern like “Michael Jackson”. In retrospect, I think it was meant to get you to question your beliefs about masculine virtue; to enable you to watch yourself searching in real time for ways to square the contradicting data, and so begin to see the contours of your ordinarily implicit beliefs and assumptions.

G noticed we were both looking at it and caught my eye with a gesture. “What do you think?” he said with a soft humor. I was tense, terrified of embarrassing myself while trying to put on a collected affect. It was impossible to get a read on what he thought from his expression - I tried to match but stumbled, falling slightly on the side of aloof ridicule. “Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t really get it,” I said with a tone that suggested there might not be anything meaningful to get. 

I notice this often when people speak about art: this guarded enthusiasm that retains a trap door, keeping some distance to prevent others from ever being able to really attach it to them.

“I think it’s saying they all are, so there’s no rule, no better way of being,” G said after a moment. I joined his position immediately, nodding and trying to complete his thought. It may have even been what I actually thought - I think it was - but my focus wasn’t really on that.

This happened at a few more exhibits - in the most embarrassing instance, I’d flip flopped at least once and maybe twice trying to match his sentiment - but eventually we left to go to an ice cream shop. 

G was still being kind to me for some reason. His daughter seemed to think I was a bit weird. We’d had lunch earlier on in the term and it had gone similarly; I’d apologized via text afterwards for seeming eager to leave, saying I hadn’t felt quite right because of a medication I had started - which was true.

When we got there, I recognized someone in line - I led recruiting for my team and they’d at one point been interested - and was relieved to be able to engage that mode in front of G. Who I could be seemed to always depend so heavily on what others already believed about me.

“You okay, you having a good time?” G asked, politely but with a hint of concern and confusion. He’d asked at the gallery as well. “Yeah, yeah this has been great, thanks for having me out.” I really tried but wasn’t convincing.

He’d dropped me off and I was back in my apartment. There was a small relief that it was at least over, but I sat at the edge of my bed staring beyond the wall in the silence, as I had many times before. Why am I like this? Why do I do this to people?

I don’t think growing up means not liking yourself, but Didion was onto something. There is a particular self you have to surrender, and this night had been so difficult for me, each perceived failure so devastating, because I hadn’t yet let go.

Adolescence is about challenging your upbringing: finding out what you think about the world and how you want to relate with it independent of your parents and your conditioning. There’s a similar phase, often in one’s 20s but earlier for some and later for others, where your notion of self is challenged. The structure that had gotten you to that point no longer suffices.

The wires holding your world together become more visible. You realize you had been in a safe harbor: one of effortless significance despite the unhappiness you may have felt; of clear goals and paths to success and meaning despite the ways you may have failed to measure up; of fundamental connectedness despite the dislike you may have had for those around you. You’re forced out by no one and nothing in particular – the track just runs out.

It was this self, the self of the safe harbor, that was being challenged. A self built up of simple beliefs and strategies, load bearing fictions and protective armor keeping you at a comfortable arms length from reality and until that point largely unexamined. X behavior is bad, I am not like the people who do X; the people who do it are bad and deserve punishment, the people who don’t are good and deserve rewards.

It was easy enough to reconcile yourself to it when it was all imaginings, before choices had to be made. But as you make choices, as you become and reality forecloses on imaginings, you start running up against its boundaries and contradictions.

If not outgrown, it becomes a self that can’t stand to be disliked; to be wrong in any way touching its interior. The self that doesn’t ‘make mistakes’, but is them. Underneath it all, it grips ever more tightly to a notion it can no longer believe: that it’s one of the good and deserving and special few.

In the later stages it is the self that doesn’t know how to say no; that can’t stop thinking about the people it hates; that feels a hot rush of confused shame as it repeatedly rewrites a text message - shit, did they see that I was typing? - feeling the tone was too hostile, or not quite right, or that the joke wouldn’t go over.

The one that can’t experience let alone enjoy much of anything at all.

To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

I think it can be understood as the result of outsourced agency, of looking to others to know if what you’re doing is right. It’s closely tied up with this sense of an imposing other; the nameless, faceless collective you have in mind in the moment you feel embarrassed; nebulous yet coherent, an overpowering felt consensus that withers wherever it is scrutinized.

It’s this sense that there are Right Answers, Right Ways of Being that the wise, the mature, the intelligent, the savvy - this faceless other - have arrived upon. Who are you to say otherwise?

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Some fears loom larger the less you know about them. I think in some ways we’ve gotten too good at protecting ourselves; too good at insulating ourselves from reality.

People don’t say “I don’t like you.” Instead it comes in hints and subtle indications - an odd tone, strange body language, the felt sense there’s something they’re not saying - and we almost never really know for sure. And it makes it far worse: we’re tormented by its shadow but never come in direct enough contact with the thing to know on a deep level - to feel - that it’s not actually that bad.

I think this is why we outsource agency: we’re so afraid of some negative outcomes that we trade it for the guarantees and order we believe a stronger, wiser, smarter Other can offer.

And that’s what the faceless other does, really - it is to the world at large what the parents were to the local environment growing up. It seems like maybe there’s a stage of development some of us miss, one in which you move from the self of the safe harbor with its external sense of authority to a less fragile self with an internal one.

Knowing the price of things, Didion calls it; having the courage of your mistakes. Moving on from a life guided at every level by a sense of inadequacy and looking over your shoulder, a world framed by your fears, toward one in which you can make mistakes rather than become them.

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Image credit 我 - @iimememe