(no subject)
My dad emailed us a couple of his family pictures from like 40+ years ago. What struck me is how clearly their individual personalities shone through. Even when they were 7 or 8 years old, even before their parents had divorced, even with a half century less of life experience, my uncle and my father already displayed their fully-formed personalities. My father looked ever the bully, making cocky and defiant faces at the camera. My uncle, on the other hand, looked away sheepishly with a goofy look on his face. You could fill out their Myers-Brigg tests just by looking at them.
I don't have a lot of pictures of myself, but flipping back through my own mental picture album (which may have been selectively edited), I notice how I was always the same, and am even the same right now. I have matured, of course...I'm older, I have more life experience, I have a different role in the world. But my core being is unchanged. If I found some old pictures of myself, I would see a sensitive child, gentle, generally a good person but perhaps shadowed by a dark cynicism and sense of growing resentment and frustration at the real world.
I value myself highly but I do not want to appear as if I'm bragging about myself. I don't want to have to resort to selling myself to others. I don't want to make bold claims that end up being false, leaving people to remember not only that I'm untalented but also full of shit. But at the same time I do want to be noticed, recognized as intelligent. To do so, I end up keeping to myself and allowing other people to learn to appreciate me.
If I keep their expectations low, and allow them to gradually discover my abilities on their own, it seems more authentic to me. People won't just know that I'm talented by hearing me tell them about it...they'll be able to see it for themselves and make their own determination. I can't stand when people dispute my credibility or think that I can't do something, and this seems like the only way I can get around that.
But it's kind of a lonely path. I can't show any weakness to anybody until they start to respect me. And for all this effort, what am I getting? Respect from some, but largely indifference since I am not making myself stand out. Perhaps in Japan the nail that stands up gets hammered down, but here in America you typically have to shout to be heard. But it's stressful to make myself so visible. It's hard to be exposed to the greater world.
For me, most human interactions are like funhouse mirrors. As I compare myself with them, a self-image forms, made from all the ways that I don't measure up to everyone else's standards. I look warped, pulled apart, and even my minor flaws bow outwards into portly, convex blobs of shame. Every moment I spend in conversation, every reaction that people have to me, all I can think about every moment is, what does this mean for me? What is this saying about me? In that way every interaction that I have is just one misstep or misunderstanding away from a personal attack. They remind me that I'm not what I should be, and I never will be. And as I consider this, I don't find myself getting angry at my circumstances, or damning the actions of anyone else. I readily accept all the blame.
Can this attitude change? I don't know. Maybe I am just fooling myself by thinking I should be something that I'll never really be. Maybe I should be true to myself, and get out of business, and start programming, which is something fun that I enjoy and would probably be good at doing. Maybe I need to be honest with myself, my personality, my passion, and let the paycheck take care of itself. In all likelihood, twenty years from now someone will uncover a caramelized picture, gummed to the bottom of an ancient drawer, a frozen moment of me being typical me. No matter what form I had taken at the time, they will recognize that inner shyness, that reservation, that curiosity, or whatever timeless Janusian spark that they see within me, and everyone will know it to be true.
I don't have a lot of pictures of myself, but flipping back through my own mental picture album (which may have been selectively edited), I notice how I was always the same, and am even the same right now. I have matured, of course...I'm older, I have more life experience, I have a different role in the world. But my core being is unchanged. If I found some old pictures of myself, I would see a sensitive child, gentle, generally a good person but perhaps shadowed by a dark cynicism and sense of growing resentment and frustration at the real world.
I value myself highly but I do not want to appear as if I'm bragging about myself. I don't want to have to resort to selling myself to others. I don't want to make bold claims that end up being false, leaving people to remember not only that I'm untalented but also full of shit. But at the same time I do want to be noticed, recognized as intelligent. To do so, I end up keeping to myself and allowing other people to learn to appreciate me.
If I keep their expectations low, and allow them to gradually discover my abilities on their own, it seems more authentic to me. People won't just know that I'm talented by hearing me tell them about it...they'll be able to see it for themselves and make their own determination. I can't stand when people dispute my credibility or think that I can't do something, and this seems like the only way I can get around that.
But it's kind of a lonely path. I can't show any weakness to anybody until they start to respect me. And for all this effort, what am I getting? Respect from some, but largely indifference since I am not making myself stand out. Perhaps in Japan the nail that stands up gets hammered down, but here in America you typically have to shout to be heard. But it's stressful to make myself so visible. It's hard to be exposed to the greater world.
For me, most human interactions are like funhouse mirrors. As I compare myself with them, a self-image forms, made from all the ways that I don't measure up to everyone else's standards. I look warped, pulled apart, and even my minor flaws bow outwards into portly, convex blobs of shame. Every moment I spend in conversation, every reaction that people have to me, all I can think about every moment is, what does this mean for me? What is this saying about me? In that way every interaction that I have is just one misstep or misunderstanding away from a personal attack. They remind me that I'm not what I should be, and I never will be. And as I consider this, I don't find myself getting angry at my circumstances, or damning the actions of anyone else. I readily accept all the blame.
Can this attitude change? I don't know. Maybe I am just fooling myself by thinking I should be something that I'll never really be. Maybe I should be true to myself, and get out of business, and start programming, which is something fun that I enjoy and would probably be good at doing. Maybe I need to be honest with myself, my personality, my passion, and let the paycheck take care of itself. In all likelihood, twenty years from now someone will uncover a caramelized picture, gummed to the bottom of an ancient drawer, a frozen moment of me being typical me. No matter what form I had taken at the time, they will recognize that inner shyness, that reservation, that curiosity, or whatever timeless Janusian spark that they see within me, and everyone will know it to be true.