Writers eye and measure the celebrity world and don’t know how to deal with the portion that falls to them; because what they’re selling is not their features, physique, or their charm; it’s more personal, it’s their brain, their them, and so they get as anxious about that as a starlet would about nose or waistline. How do I husband this thing that’s earning me praise and money? How do I protect and expand it? And what is it people like about me anyway?
That’s David Lipsky in his book Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself about his road trip with David Foster Wallace.
I’d quibble and say that your brain is not fully or maybe even mostly your you. At least not the brain that shows up in your writing. The brain that shows up in your writing is every bit as artificial and surface-y as the starlet’s charm.
If there exists such a thing as a You (and I’m skeptical there does) then I think it’s probably best viewed not through your thoughts and certainly not through your published writing but through your actions (and maybe to a lesser extent your intentions). But the topic of personal identity is sufficiently inscrutable that I can’t think about it without the uncomfortable feeling that I’m grasping at vapor.
The broader point I think he’s going for, though, is that your identity, whatever it is, ought to be steeled against the information of how other people regard you.
Here’s David Foster Wallace, slightly revised: (sacrilege, I know)
Something happens in your late twenties where you realize that how other people regard you does not have enough calories in it to keep you from blowing your brains out. That you’ve got to make some other détente.
Well, I haven’t quite made it to my late twenties yet, so maybe I just haven’t yet reached that realization, but for now I can’t help but disagree with what I think is the main point: “who cares what other people think?”
I get that constructing a self-worth exclusively out of your interpretation of others’ regard for you is a fabulously flimsy if not counterproductive venture, but I think it makes just as little sense to [attempt to] completely ignore external information. What are you going to do, look in the mirror and repeat to yourself that you are an awesome and lovable Gift To This Earth despite what any external information says about you? (Ahem, the Stuart Smalley approach.) That seems equally as flimsy and counterproductive.
I’d suggest that the best existential détente is keeping your strivings for self-worth and self-improvement and godliness in the healthy perspective that what the external information says about you is mostly true – you do suck; you are a fabulously flawed human just like all the other fabulously flawed humans – and, as Stuart Smalley would say, and that’s okay. Try to become less sucky, if you want, but recognize that about the only thing that is going to incontrovertibly define you as a human is that you are always going to retain some non-trivial level of suck.
It’s okay to suck because the self needn’t have worth for life to have worth. We’re all unique if incontrovertibly sucky snowflakes helplessly bound to one another just trying to make it through this mess of a life before our time is up. That should be reason enough to get up in the morning.
OK. That felt 38% too deep for a blog post, so have a puppy in a basket:
Psst, click me.
