by CJ Quines • on
Not my best self
i know what i think you think of me
Two months ago I went to SPARC, a high school summer camp, as a counselor. On the last day of camp, we write short notes for each other, which we put in envelopes, then take home. Kinda like signing yearbooks, but multiple people can write messages for you simultaneously, and with less quotes and song lyrics.
Last night, I opened my envelope. I think it’s a relatively long time to wait before opening the envelope; most people I know open theirs within a few days of the camp ending. But what I’ve done in the past, and what I’ve done again this year, was to wait for a particularly bad day, and only then opening the envelope. And that happened to be last night.
Some excerpts:
Thank you so much for teaching, laughing, and listening to me
the Platonic ideal of a good friend
I aspire to just do stuff like you!
I feel so much wholeness + integration in you.
Thanks for being
Really helpful
and easy to talk to
you are the essence of chillness
I couldn’t help but think, reading all of these kind words, that CJ looks like a great person. I kept thinking that these notes didn’t feel like they were for me, that there’s some CJ out there who’s supposed to be the recipient, but that person isn’t me, isn’t the person I think about when I think about me.
The picture I’ve held for myself, over the past month or so, is someone abrasive. Someone filled with existential dread and suppressed anxiety, who mopes and broods and sulks about it all the time. When I think about how I interact with others, the first things that come to mind are all the things I’ve said, almost always at work, which were ignorant, insensitive, pessimistic, unprofessional, unkind. All I think about are all the people I’ve disappointed, people who are almost always coworkers.
That CJ from two months ago isn’t so disjoint from me that I can’t remember being them. There was, in fact, a two-week period of my life, when people thought of me as chill and integrated and approachable and whatever. Or maybe, more importantly, there was a time I thought of myself as being all these things.
And yet, that’s not how I feel when it comes to life-as-I’m-living-it right now. No matter how many times I remind myself that identity is a mutable thing, and all that we observe are patterns of behavior, and supposed traits are mere labels and not underlying truths, no matter how many times I tell myself these things, I still feel like there’s an I and a myself and there’s this ideal self and there’s this observed self, and none of these concepts are the same.
I think it’s worse than that. This observed self isn’t granular enough. There’s the self-image, which is what I observe of myself. There’s the other-image, which is what others observe of me. Except, I don’t actually have the other-image; what I have is what I observe the other-image to be. And further still, there’s the self-other-image, which is what I believe about my other-image.
With this terminology, note the difference between the other-image (what I observe others think about me) and the self-other-image (what I believe others think about me). It’s similar to the thing that I Know What You Think of Me points at. Even if I hear others express admiration and appreciation of me, I can’t help but think that others don’t actually admire or appreciate me.
In contemplating envy, I wrote:
i’ve always found it hard to accept other people’s appreciation. too often the thanks doesn’t make me feel anything. […a friend] asked whether there was anything that made me feel appreciated, and i said it was hard to come up with anything, when really i didn’t even appreciate myself.
Being unable to accept appreciation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’d be weird if you accepted praise for something you weren’t involved in at all. I would feel weird if I was recognized for something I didn’t intend to do, or was forced to do, or didn’t like doing. And I don’t think anyone would feel good about a compliment they knew was insincere. These much are prerequisites to feeling appreciated for something.
But there’s more than that. I think the appreciate myself part is needed. It’s about being appreciated for things that I myself appreciate. Because there are parts of myself that I do appreciate: like how I help run puzzlehunts, or how I put effort into keeping up with friends, or how I keep a blog and post kinda-regularly. And sometimes, when people tell me they appreciate these things, I can reply with a “thank you” and mean it.
Is it weird, then, to select the parts of myself that I want other people to praise? Shouldn’t that be the sort of thing that’s emergent and uncrafted, something defined via extension? Why do I privilege the self-image over the other-image, and then complain that the other-image doesn’t match my self-image?