Brain Food #840: Finding someone at home
On self-respect, self-awareness, and being with oneself
Thoughts of the day
Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “If you are lonely when you are alone, you are in bad company.”
If someone is not comfortable living with oneself, the only travel companion one truly has in life, then the journey will be continuously thrown off course by whatever forces cross its path.
An essay I go back to from time to time is Joan Didion’s 1961 piece for Vogue, On Self-Respect. Self-respect comes, of course, from within, and its foundations lie in self-knowledge, self-awareness, and self-acceptance.
Self-respect comes before formal education, wealth, or success, and there is no grander example of this than one’s grandparents (the greatest teachers we can have):
“Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”
Didion reminds us that we are, first and foremost, incredibly capable of deceiving our own selves: “Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception.” Usually, this form of self-deception appears when we convince ourselves we want something that we don’t. The realisation of this comes late at night, often at those 3am moments, the regret that Tim Kreider described as hiding behind “people trying to justify their choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden behind all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3am terror of regret.”
The journey to self-respect starts with identifying one’s own definition of success, and aligning that with what one has to offer to the world, unphased by the perils of prestige. In the words of Paul Graham, “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.”
As Martin Scorsese said in his recent GQ interview, “Just be quiet and make the movies. You can’t make a movie for an award. Sure, I would’ve liked it, but like, so what? I mean, I had to go on and make pictures.”
To make movies for the awards is what Virginia Woolf described as conformity:
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.”
Self-respect carries the weight of sacrifice, suggested Didion: “Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price.” Sometimes that sacrifice is someone else’s dream, or the easy path. The opposite is the sacrifice of oneself. If you pretend to be something you are not for too long, you might end up becoming it.
But the more fortunate of us humans have the capability of agency: “Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.” We can experience life as a verb, not a noun: “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.”
In some form, though she does not use the word, which only became popularised over recent years, Didion suggests that self-respect is the result of possessing boundaries. Ultimately, not every call needs to be answered:
“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.
[…]
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 specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. 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.”
Oh my, this is one of your best posts!!!! I will read and reread I am sure.