Being Yourself (S2E3)

Someone has to be... right?

Sometimes, though not as often these days, I have the thought:

Do you need to be so much who you are right now?

It’s a slight improvement on, but in the same spirit as, “what is wrong with you?” And when it hits it hits with the force of a 30-year-old insult I never had a comeback for, an esprit de l’escalier where the stairway just keeps going down forever into the very bowels of the earth.

Recently I took a small break from a group chat I’m in because I was feeling too much like the person I am. I was reading my responses and thinking, who is this? And realizing with mounting concern, this person is me!

If I may be so bold, “Just be yourself” is terrible advice when being yourself is what got you into the mess in the first place. (The mess = existing around other people.) “Just be yourself” is what people say when they’ve never felt the cold sting of oh god why am I still speaking?

Of course, you have to be yourself. No one else can be. But what self should you be?

Selfhood in humans is not the expression of any central unity. We are programmed to perceive identity in ourselves, when in truth there is only change, We are hardwired for the illusion of self.
- John Gray, as quoted by Tim Carpenter in To Photograph Is To Learn How To Die

In 2015 at TEDxBerkeley, thought-leader¹ Mike Robbins delivered a talk titled “Bring Your Whole Self to Work”. Because no memeable idea goes unpunished, that talk replicated with wild abandon.

In 2017, LinkedIn launched a campaign with the tagline of “Bring Your Whole Self”. And then came the think-pieces.

Forbes, May 10, 2018: “Bring Your Whole Self To Work” and August 10, 2022: “13 Effective Ways To Bring Your ‘Whole Self’ To Work” but also November 9, 2022: “13 Ways To Bring ‘Too Much’ Of Your Whole Self To Work”

Harvard Business Review, Jul 1, 2020: “Parents, Bring Your Whole Self To Work but then February 1, 2021: “How Much Of Your ‘Authentic Self’ Should You Really Bring To Work” but if you do want to then Dec 1, 2023: “How To Bring Your Authentic Self To Work”.

Business Insider with the dissenting opinion, May 5, 2018: “Google is wrong: You should not ‘bring your whole self to work’”. And as recently as February 16, 2024: “Why It’s A Bad Idea To ‘Bring Your Whole Self To Work’”.

What none of these cover (an assumption on my part because there is not enough love on god’s green earth to get me to read any of them) is the small issue of what even is your whole self? Is it the scary bits? The secrets? Is it everything, everywhere, all at once?

How many selves do you have to mash together before you have a whole self?

You can buy rocks in which are carved words intended to be inspiring—LOVE, HOPE, DREAM, etc. Some have the word BELIEVE. They puzzle me. Is belief a virtue? Is it desirable in itself? Does it not matter what you believe so long as you believe something? If I believed that horses turned into artichokes on Tuesdays, would that be better than doubting it?
- Ursula K. Le Guin from a February 2014 blog post

When I was experiencing A Lot Of Life And Visibly Struggling, my sister wrote and said that IF I were gay I could tell the family and they would love me all the same. Once I was done crying gigantic, messy tears I wrote back and said, thank you, but I’m not gay, and thus saying I am wouldn’t be the solution to anything.

To be clear, I’m also not straight. I’m just not gay. God, I wished the way I felt was simply a matter of “You’re a gay, Harry”, but alas. In fact, when I hit 40 and finally, quietly started acknowledging my queerness, I didn’t feel a sense of relief. I felt a sense of oh great now where does this fit into the person I’m trying to conceptualize?

When I joined a queer group at work I spent every minute of every meeting worrying over the same thing. Please don’t ask me how I’m queer please don’t ask me how I’m queer. (PSA: if someone asks you that in a meeting they’re some kind of narc.)

I worried because I didn’t then and still mostly don’t have a good narrative for what being queer means to me. I know what I’ve done, and I know what I feel. I just don’t know how it fits together.

I don’t have the story. And who we are, ultimately, is the story we tell ourselves.

"Everybody needs a little time away"
I heard her say, from each other
Even lovers need a holiday
Far away, from each other
- “Hard To Say I’m Sorry” by Chicago (emphasis theirs)

Here’s some equivalencies I’ve just made up:

loving yourself = knowing yourself = being on your own = telling your story

Why is self-love so hard? I think one reason might be that apart from the terminally narcissistic, we tend to see ourselves as the greatest source of our own disappointment. I think this is also why I’ve often hated being alone.

Spend more time with the person who’s failed me the most? No thanks!

And why is it so hard to know yourself? Even in the context of this newsletter I’m not going to pretend to have a single, digestible answer for that, but I think partly it’s down to our cultural aversion to ever being alone. And our weaponized ways of avoiding it. When I say alone I mean alone with our own thoughts, which rules out listening to podcasts and even things like reading.

Sometimes it’s hard to be alone with your own thoughts because your own thoughts are assholes. In the past my thoughts have been aggressively shitty to me, and the idea of being alone with them was like that fable where the frog gives a scorpion a ride across the river only for the scorpion to go full scorpion, drowning them both.

Yeah, we’re in your head, but if we’re going down we’re all going down!

So we need to add “=safe to be alone” to the mix. This is the hard part. It does not feel safe to be alone for all kinds of reasons, and that’s before even getting to the internal ones. Accomodation in cities is largely skewed towards the assumption of dual-occupancy. That assumption is increasingly a self-fulfilled prophecy, meaning whether you’re in a couple or not you’ll be looking at one-bedroom apartments priced as if two people live there.

It’s like the lack of communal tables in restaurants.² They’re good not so much because you can go and sit with other people, but so that your solitariness is better situated within a public space. Alone, but not isolated. It’s the difference between a club where everyone is clumped into their friend groups and one where everyone is facing the DJ. I hear people bemoan the latter and praise the former, and I always think, well, that’s fine if you happened to roll in with a group of friends.

I’ve been lucky enough to spend time alone, truly alone, with myself and my thoughts. The only reason I was able to do it was because I knew I wasn’t actually alone. I have my family. I have friends. This is privilege. Not feeling safe alone, not feeling like you can be on your own, drives people into terrible situations. And whether that fear is financial or social or cultural or familial, I think it stops us from knowing the deep, watery depths of ourselves, and being able to love them.

For about a year I lived in other people’s houses. Because I didn’t have my own space, for some time all my belongings fit into two duffel bags which, if you know me now, probably sounds impossible. This is how I learned that owning things was a way I had of avoiding being alone. (Cue clip from Fight Club.)

During this time I’d go for long walks, some across multiple London zones. (For reference zones in London are larger than the city I currently live in.) I’d try and not listen to podcasts or music. I knew there were people I could call. I was out in public.

And I’d hold my thoughts and feelings and try and understand them. In the beginning I held them like you might a particularly angry badger. They weren’t the greatest thoughts.

Why are you like this? Why can’t you just be happy? Do you maybe kind of suck? Are you sure you don’t suck? What evidence do you have for not sucking?

I’m not going to pretend this was a good time. But if you have the support—social, familial, financial, chemical—to weather that shit-talking storm without filling up the space with people and things, new voices will emerge³ with different thoughts and more expansive questions.

How do I know those were the “real” me or the “whole” me? I don’t! I only know the first voice was trying to kill me and the others weren’t, and some frog/scorpion math let me know who I wanted to follow.

It’s too neat and trite to say, “I spent some time alone and learned to love myself,” but it is accurate to say without spending time alone I couldn’t know who I was trying to love. Every minute around other people is a performance, even if those people encourage you to be entirely who you are.

So, if you struggle with yourself, or the idea of having a self at all, find a safe way to be on your own. Go into public spaces and observe who you are when no one who knows you is around. It doesn’t have to be for days, although friends have extolled to me the benefits of silent retreats. Take an hour. Expand it into a day. Try for a week if that’s something you can do.

When I meet someone after a breakup they’re always at least a little surprised by how differently they seem to occupy space, particularly within their own body. They realize how much of their thoughts and actions were constantly in relation to another person. This makes sense, and I don’t mean to imply that being in a couple is bad, or necessarily restrictive of your personhood.⁴

But I think it’s safe to say that from the moment we arrive, we are always in relation to other people. First by necessity, then by construction, and ultimately just by social inertia. Even when we’re not physically around other people we tend to frame ourselves in relation to them. Again, this is good! Community is good. People are good.

But for the purposes of knowing and loving ourselves, a little break might be in order.

1. I assume this is a self-given title, much like I call myself The King of Community Radio.

2. I know that’s not why communal tables aren’t there but I think it’s an unintended consequence, especially as third spaces for gathering become increasingly scarce outside of transactional situations.

3. Someone mentioned at work that they don’t have an internal monologue, which started an extensive thread on neurodiversity, and this sounds both amazing and good and rotten and terrifying.

4. In all likelihood I’ll argue the opposite in a future newsletter.