A little while back, Kellyn said something nice to me about something I wrote. I am quite fortunate that this sort of thing happens occasionally, but while I am grateful for my good luck, I’ve never been able to respond to such moments evenly. My mind floods with noise, of two varieties:
I recall the writing in question. Usually after I post something, despite having drafted it and scrutinized it for however long, I reread it again with fresh eyes. It appears quite different to me the instant it becomes public; in addition to many technical and substantive faults I find in it, it seems affected to me, so artificial as to have come practically from another self entirely, and I despise it, feel mortified about it. From that point on, it is this view of the piece that comes to mind when someone mentions it; I shudder with shame, which even now feels deserved.
I look to my personal culture and find no ready expressions for use. On a very practical level, I do not have a readymade response for compliments. What we say in such moments reflects two things: (a) the nature and needs of our personalities, which constrain how we can act by making some statements, gestures, or behaviors unthinkable in the context of “who we are”; and (b) our etiquette and repertoire of social maneuvers, some of which we inherit from our surroundings and some of which we very deliberately choose. I suspect some of the personal etiquette I’ve constructed is incompatible with who I am in a way that creates categories of interaction I will always fuck up. For example: I’m neurotic and weak, but I am attracted to honor culture norms. A typical honor culture way to respond to a compliment might be to say, very simply, “Thank you.” Such a terse reply, suggesting minimal gratitude on my part and no awareness that I might be, and in fact am, undeserving of this praise, is unimaginable to me. More consequentially, I think it would seem rude coming from me. I think we’re not always wrong about what we fear our personalities dictate. In any event: I don’t know what to say, so I blunder through it and worry a bit about it, but feel net-very-good about it all afterwards.
Our conversation brought this all to mind for the millionth time. As it happens, I also tend to feel ashamed of myself if I’m on a podcast or speak in public; I am never nervous beforehand in any of these contexts, but afterward I frequently feel disgusted with myself, apoplectic with discomfort. As reliable as this misery is, it is also the case that many people I respect have had kind things to say about my work or public speaking, such that I can say I “know” it is not totally awful, is probably fine, is good enough, in any event. It feels not only ungrateful but actually arrogant to pretend otherwise, as though the opinions of others mean nothing against my private self-loathing. Why would I think I know better than they do? (I think there’s actually quite a lot of arrogance and pride in many kinds of psychological negativism; we are protective of our miseries).
Something causes the feeling to persist, though. I’ve tried to follow the succession of sensations and thoughts, although I suspect I’ve missed a great deal. But it seems to be something like this:
When I write or speak in a public context, I do enter some sort of “mode,” or at least that’s how it feels to me. In this mode, my thought and output are largely one; there are hardly any meta-processes running, and the totality of what happens in my mind is simply the words that come out. When I write, I edit quite a bit, but each time it is in this mode, so that my editing process is: re-read, find fault, enter mode and regenerate with certain goals in mind, re-read, etc.
This mode is both hyperconscious —it feels relatively “fast” and “attentive,” by my own standards anyway— and unconscious. I regularly do not remember what I’ve said on podcasts, and feel, when the recording stops, as though I’m “waking up,” in a sense. After I write something, especially the first draft, I sometimes wonder: “Where did this come from?” I also always feel like asking: “Who do you think you are?”
This mode seems to me to be adjacent to many states of mind I’ve read about, akin or related perhaps to e.g. “flow state,” or improvisational states of performance (which I experienced many of as a musician), or being “in the zone” in sport, etc. My understanding is that in these states, we are operating from “lower” states of consciousness, as it were, fluidly following “embodied” guidance from experience without the meddlesome and inefficient control of the “higher-order” parts of the mind.
For myself, then, I think the writing process is like this: I enter a weird state of mind where I’m not optimizing as I usually do for my emotional safety, and then I publicize the result. Even with the substantial revisions my writing undergoes, as mentioned it’s still the case that most of the words flow from parts of myself that are not as subject the control of my socialized, neurotic self. This does not mean that it’s anything like “automatic” writing; it’s in fact highly labored, and, as I’m painfully aware, somewhat preening. It’s not that it happens without calculation, then, only that it happens with different calculations which are not subordinate to my social sensitivities, my psychological preferences, or my wider aims in life.1
So: two selves, or two modes of selfhood:
My “normal” or everyday / IRL self, which draws from some model blending e.g. parents, friends, threads from various ambient memeplexes, a very corrupted form of the aforementioned honor culture, vibes, my “organic” mental processes, etc.
My “creative” (lol) or “intellectual” (lol) self, which draws from another model blending, perhaps, the tone and styles of various heroes, source texts, etc. (but still presumably constrained by some of the sources of the first self).
This is a partial list, of course; like everyone else, I have many contending selves.2 A theme of being bipolar is experiencing the incompatibility of some of them as one cycles through ways of being, monomaniacal obsessions, and so on. I’ll never forget meeting a wonderful girl in a bar in New York in December of 1999. I was in a low state, from general mood patterns / swings and also the effects of winter; I was dark and serious, talked mostly about serious things, was certainly in a pretentious phase, and wore all black. I remember a long conversation about jazz, of all things, as well as time spent comparing depressions sympathetically. We hit it off and she asked me to get in touch the next time I was in town.
The next time I was in town, however, was more than three months later. The season was just turning to spring, and more consequentially I had started to rise again, turning hypomanic. I was extroverted, spastic, colorful, and amused; I wore ludicrous cowboy clothes and styled my hair differently and wanted to have fun. I called her up and we met, and she said she very literally didn’t recognize me at first. After a few hours together, it was clear she found this version of me utterly uninteresting (surely correctly) and perhaps clownish, and although we parted amiably, I took it to heart. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last, that an unmanaged transition of self engendered confusion in and rejection by people I liked.
In sum, then: public expression for me is the work of a self which draws from sources which are, in many ways, inauthentic, imitative; perhaps the nakedness of the imitation is more overt than is the case with my “ordinary” self, which likely draws from more and more varied sources (and is moderately less performative); at the very least, the ordinary self is calibrated for self-preservation.3 I experience the existence of artifacts of different selves as a kind of danger: people will see that I am a shambolic heap of borrowed bits and will not only reject the work of the speaking self but will conclude —rightly— that neither self is “real” (they are not) and that my entire person is a giant, pathetic sham (which it is!). And because I’m immature, I still think there is some possibility of control or integration that would change all of this —make me whole, make me real— such that I feel in addition to the shame a simple tactical regret: “I shouldn’t have done this. The game is up.”
But then someone like Kellyn will say something nice and I couldn’t care less about all this meta trivia. It reminds me a bit of the infamous Janet Malcolm line that opens The Journalist and the Murderer: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” I think this may be safely expanded to include many writers of all kinds, and perhaps all living people on earth. But I hesitate to suggest that I am neither too stupid nor too full of myself; I am both, and while post-publishing omne animalium triste est, I do keep coming back to it.4
What those aims are is somewhat amusing to me! I think they might largely revolve around the idea of “not violating the implied or expressed principles of my favorite writers,” such that e.g. I worry much more about how deliberate my punctuation is than about whether what I write is even interesting. It’s terrible.
It’s like an extremely awkward NAMI meetup in here.
This preoccupation with authenticity is extremely dull, but I was born in 1980 and grew up under a regime that interrogated realness ruthlessly. Holden Caufield’s contempt for “phonies” may have inaugurated it, but it lasted well into the late 1990s and is probably impossible for me to fully discard. I am impressed with younger people who feel no need to insist that they are unconcerned with what others think!
That the original Latin phrase is about sex is probably not unrelated: that can also be an occasion for the shuffling of selves and the shame of realizing we are not what we want, intend, or pretend to be.
I enjoyed this piece quite a bit and related quite strongly to it. Feel like you are in my cranium!
I’ve got a whole satchel full of nice things to say to you. I strategically figure out how to deliver you compliments only at the right time so you might except.