The Ocean & the Selfish

I want to address a certain kind of preoccupation with knowing the self that has been troubling me lately. It troubles me not because I want to rid myself of it, but because I sense an unconscious belief in the rationality of this inclination that I wish to make conscious.

Often times the things that continue to drive us unconsciously are not inherently bad. [Enter the gut feeling]. But in their being unconscious you invite a risk of forsaking an unconscious intelligence in exchange for a borrowed belief followed by an uncalled-for self-criticism as a result of the failure to act in accordance with that belief. (Or worse, an inability to reawaken the unconscious coupled by a disillusionment with the borrowed belief— the accursed limbo that can terrifyingly last a lifetime.)

This preoccupation with knowing the self comes with a set of habits and behaviors that may come close to being selfish, self-centered, with the act being labeled navel-gazing. But the alternative, the lack of self-awareness can come across as agreeableness. And it is that which makes the world go round, doesn’t it? It is what makes the advertising work, the fear-mongering rule, the propaganda sway, makes the exploitation cloaked as tradition continue to take control, the algorithm echo-chamber continue to ring, and the biases persist while making sure that our inadequacy is fed constantly and remains cashable.

The world today seems to be designed for expansion. Yet isn’t it strange how inevitable is the contraction? It reminds me of the “Monkey’s Paw,” a horror story written by W.W. Jacobs in 1902, a cautionary tale, warning against the dangers of tampering with fate and the unforeseen consequences of getting what one wishes for. We, as a species, wished for progress, longer lives, options, ease of access, and development. We got what we asked for. But we also got more pollution, new diseases, more loneliness, more poverty, and war. It is a give and take. There is always a terrible price to be paid.

My proclivity for solitude developed early on when I realized the impact not being in touch with myself and how I was doing had on me and the people around me. How I show up in the world depends heavily on how aware I am about what is happening inside me. Sure, I can drown this difficult yet necessary conversation with the self in a thousand different ways but in my experience, I would only be delaying what inevitably needs to be done. Luckily, my unconscious unease with any long gaps where I go on without that self-talk is way too inconvenient for me to simply carry on without it. But beware the danger of that feeling being suppressed for too long that it almost dies out. At any cost, never let that happen.

The idea is to expand inwards. And I know that sounds like a load of humbug. But let me explain.

I am sure you have come across these lines a countless time:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower 

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour

William Blake’s famous Auguries of Innocence. I read these lines in an old brown quotation book my mother had received as a part of her university prize. At the time, I had not read the entire poem but the philosophy behind these lines was the one I was fascinated by early on. It made sense to seek the macrocosmic in the microcosmic. It was like looking at a miniature house, zooming out and then playfully, playing around with it, a low-risk way to test any hypothesis.

I have a distinct memory of all the moments in which I was face-to-face, one-on-one with something bigger than myself. The sky, the sea, the mountains, the pain or joy opening up to swallow me whole. These moments are memorable in being akin. These experiences moved me in a way that started this preoccupation with knowing the self, of being a part of the whole that is both part and whole, like a piece of the sky, fathomable yet as much like a sky as the whole. Here was a propensity for truth that could somehow be monitored, an ocean whose deepest depths, though far from being fully charted, presented some hope of being navigated, the being who with enough experience could be calibrated, I could laugh and cry like a lunatic, unobserved and true. That even in putting forward a deception, I could not possibly deceive. That divine freedom of knowing. Just knowing. The closest you could come to flying. Consciously or unconsciously, my hope has always been that in striving for this, I can somehow understand the world. That if I could see myself in the strongest, the most vulnerable, elemental sense, reduced and enhanced to my essence, that moments like that would open up the world to me and me to the world in a way that nothing else might. Like in a miasma of fluctuating lights, I have a chance of catching a glimpse of something true and honest within myself, if even for a moment.

To put it plainly, I am fascinated by the self the same way a child is fascinated by a snowflake that happens to fall into her hand that she loves because it is that chance part of the whole that she is allowed to be in such close proximity with.

The self is the sample of the world you get to be the most intimate with.

How you show up in the world, the kindness you extend to it, or how much you allow yourself to be exploited because of parts of self you could not accept and hence, give space to resentment, greed, distrust, or hatred, is directly proportional to how much you understand yourself.

But what does it take to know and reassemble the self?

For many of us, our self is a black box that we take where we go. There is no need to open it. We have our name, our religion, nationality, occupation, and goals. And these are enough markers to recognize ourselves. But are these enough?

Or are we just barely scratching the surface, afraid.

The hardest part of knowing your “self” is not liking it necessarily because it is “you.” And that is the mother of denial.

Well, there is a whole wide world out there ready to feed on your inability to sit with yourself in the same room. What happens when you cannot rely on the identity markers outside of you that you thought you could rely on forever? The self doesn’t crumble like a house of cards but our ability to accept it does.

In her 1961 essay “On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion writes about the time she was not elected for the Phi Beta Kappa:

To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.

[…]

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. 

“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion

When we lose self-respect, we lose control and spend the rest of our lives reacting to its injustice and our insecurity, through war and greed.

I have hope in the self. Why? Because we cannot go on to deceive ourselves forever and always. The self is where we are often face to face with the real. Didion writes:

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.

“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion

The real challenge lies in accepting the self. Think of it this way. The world is out there to sit jury on your flaws, real or unreal, to commend your virtues, real or unreal, often subjectively or arbitrarily. But at the end of the day, when the curtains are drawn and the lights are out, you are your best judge. Because you know yourself in a way, with the intimacy that no one else does. It doesn’t matter what you say. What matters is what emerges in the still quiet moments as you sit with yourself. As Didion puts it, “It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.” No one needs to see those parts of you, but it is essential that you do and when you are ready, come to terms with them. If you were to try to brush them under the carpet, be prepared for the unconscious mind to take hold of them and keep them close and shiny for late night replays like a bloody Gollum from Lord of the Rings.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion

Think of your flaws and mistakes as hurt and lost potential. Imagine them like little fluffy chickens who haven’t learned to fly. Now, do you want to feel ashamed of them or would you rather take them under your wing, nurture them, accept them as they are while striving to make sure they grow, even if only to become KFC some day? I got nothing against fried chicken.

If you come to accept your shortcomings and mistakes, no one gets to use them as puppet strings. No amount of advertising, no amount of propaganda can mislead you, cashing in on your insecurities. External criticism cannot hurt you because you have seen yourself fully and understand and accept that you will always be a work in progress and never perfect. And thank God for that (for the same reason we have been spared from eternity.)

For what seemed like the longest time, till my 20s, I felt a sense of alienation from self. Women are often more prone to this, but men are equally susceptible. It felt like I inherited my mother’s own anxiety to be a good daughter and a good woman, simply following what I was told was right without knowing why. Hence, the feeling of inauthenticity continued to creep in. Then came a phase where I invited the world in and that is what took control. One form of being controlled was replaced by another. A new version of right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, good or bad. The judgements kept coming from all ends. I got split into many different selves to continue performing at optimal levels. And surely enough, the self, split into many selves, divorced from the stream that sustains our authenticity, eventually, fell into my arms, exhausted.

At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play rôles 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.

“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion

I went through all the phases of blaming and blame shifting, resentments, avoidance, isolation, guilt, shame. I could not say no when I really wanted to because I felt guilt, and I could not say yes because saying yes would mean betraying the needs of my injured self. So, there I was, stuck in the limbo.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one’s sanity becomes an object of speculation among one’s acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.

“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion

We need to be authentic. Being agreeable is not a virtue. Let’s stop commending and encouraging women to adjust, to please, to bend, to be agreeable. I am still in the process of learning to say comfortably what I can and cannot do, want or do not want, and to not guilt trip or judge myself for it. I am critical of myself, sure, but not in a way that I reject myself. For everything I do, I ask myself, why am I doing this? What are my reasons for it? There are things I want to do, those I want to stop doing, but for now the goal I have set myself is to simply be in control of the reason, in the hope of making the unconscious conscious.

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. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. 

“On Self-Respect”, Joan Didion

Another surprising aspect of this journey which is the one that fascinates me the most is how as you continue to go deeper into yourself, you find yourself woven closer to the people around you in a strange way. You understand the insecurities that everyone feels in a seemingly noisy hall full of people. All it takes is a conversation with one person there. The more you know yourself, the more present you can be for those around you. But also, the more you know yourself, the more you begin to respect another’s need for control and space.

A drop may not feel like much in an ocean. But if you see the little things as keys to bigger things, you begin to understand that in relation to the enormity of the universe, our two hands, are in fact, a perfect fit, perfectly capable of designing the lives we deserve.