So I’m Not As Great As I Thought I Was: The Bright Side
Joan Didion begins her 1961 essay On Self-Respect by recounting her reaction to rejection from “America’s most prestigious honors society,” Phi Beta Kappa. She writes:
I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man … lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. 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.
Ah, Joan, me too. This “conviction that lights would always turn green for me” is something I have also begun to lose recently, and thank god for her essay, because I have finally begun to understand that this loss is probably the best thing that’s happened to me in years.
It started with Yale. Then came Brown, and finally, Harvard. After years of academic excellence and achievement came a shocking proclamation from the Gatekeepers of Intelligence I’d been guiltily courting in my fantasies for years: “Nah.” And all I was left with was the rather brutal splash-to-the-face of cold water that is the acknowledgment of one’s own mediocrity. “Shit,” I thought with appalled despair. “… I’m average.”
All things considered, I’d like to think that I handled this emotional earthquake rather well. I cried for a couple weeks, only got hives once, and finally sucked it up and got on my flight to southern California. The remaining aftershocks of the earthquake are few. Sure, I created a Transfer Common App account and seconds later found myself scrolling through the application questions for Brown University, but you can’t really blame me. Blame the “Talented and Gifted” program I was placed in by my school when I was eight years old! Blame my parents for not informing me that my attempt to read Moby Dick when I was nine was really kind of weird! Blame Harvard for the false reassurance of the waitlist!! So what if deep down I still think I somehow deserve to go to a “better” school than my current one? Maybe I do. Maybe the Unbelievable Oversight of My Clearly Demonstrated Genius that admissions decisions represented for me was exactly as outrageous and criminal as it felt.
Here enters Joan. Joan, who pointed out to me rather cold-bloodedly in her essay that I have no one to blame for my intellectual insecurity but myself. Joan, who thought it necessary to tell me point-blank (and without any warning, I might add) that my reliance on external validation was, in fact, the result of a crippling lack of that holiest and most misunderstood of attributes: self-respect.
I’d like to think — and so I do — that I respect myself. I’ve never been a particularly insecure person, always considered myself to be smart and beautiful and worthy. But here is the essential problem, recently uncovered by Joan and I, with my self-respect: too much of it banks on the affirmations of people other than myself. I know I am smart because my teachers and grades tell me so, not because I have a sincere and unchallengeable faith in the value of my own ideas. I know I am beautiful because boys and girls have regularly expressed interest in having sex with me, not because I truly believe that I’d be just as sexy if I woke up as a Steve Buscemi look-alike.
This is all a form of self-respect, sure, but it is the equivalent of an itchy, plastic, stunted turf field. Despite its nice appearance, growth just isn’t possible. What I am now determined to develop is the good stuff, the kind of grass that is so long and lush and powerful that it takes over the neighbor’s yards and rebuffs without effort any old ugly-ass John Deere lawnmower that waltzes in. This is the self-respect that doesn’t depend on validation or affirmation from others. What I have now is a good start, but the time is nigh for me to look at the artificial, externally dependent amour propre I’ve been relying on for years, accept that its comfort is futile, and proclaim: “thank u, next.”
If Joan is right, then achieving the glimmering gold variety of self-respect reliant only on the self and nothing else could change everything. According to her, it’s the key to loving with indifference — aka, loving without dependence — and to developing that rare kind of courage which is inarguably the sexiest, most mouth-watering characteristic attainable.
Plus, it’s life insurance. No matter how much I want to deny it, at sunset, my body is going to become droopy and creased and slow, and my brain is not going attach magnetically to brand new concepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, let alone remember where I left the car keys. Life’s deterioration is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to be oppressive if I’ve developed true self-respect. At the end of my days, when I wake up and look in the mirror and see the face of Steve Buscemi, I will only have myself to say: “lookin’ good.”
How am I going to do this? I’ll begin by taking Joan’s advice — I’ve recognized enough of On Self-Respect as gospel to trust its recommendations — and start coaxing forth some bona fide self-respect by getting to know myself as I really am, by paying the prices of my actions without excuses, and by devoting myself to devising my own separate peace. But in the end, who knows what will work? I am going to have to figure it out as I go. Respecting myself, by myself, for myself as I truly am is the game’s final boss, and facing it, I feel like Mario: short and adorable and unlikely to win right away, but sure to win eventually, as long as I keep trying.
So I’m Not As Great As I Thought I Was: The Bright Side
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