Observations on being an observer

I'm giving up beer for Lent. It's going to be a long forty some days. Aside from actually drinking it, trying a new kind of beer is the best part of having a bottle or two on the weekend. There are so many different kinds of beer and so many breweries constantly releasing variations on those varieties that it's easy to discover something really great. I won't be making any discoveries over the next several weeks. I've already had to pass on buying a new beer from one of my new favorite breweries.

It's this eagerness to try new beers that helps me convince myself that I'm not all that conventional. I can try new things. I don't limit myself to the choices that mass marketers put in front of us. I tell myself the same story with the books that I read and the restaurants that I'm willing to try. But in the end, sampling different kinds of beer or reading a variety of books is really just another way of observing the world. It may be more active than just watching things go by, but it's about consumption rather than production. I'm choosing to consume what others produce rather than producing something that makes a statement about who I am and what I'm about. I'm not really putting a part of myself out there for others to see. I'm just sitting back and judging what other people have produced.

I even try to put a spin on my day to day work in order to make me feel that I'm putting something out into the world that forces me to express my humanity. I'm a chemist. I work in a lab. I tell my wife all the time that my work is creative. It is creative in that I have to generate original insights into technical problems, but the creativity that grows from that process is more of a statement about the system I'm studying than a commentary on my preferences and taste. The problem defines the limits. The space is set for me. I don't have to put up the boundaries, or choose to ignore the boundaries put up by others. I'm merely capturing what nature has already expressed. I'm not expressing my view of the world.

Sharing my view of the world would be an active statement. That would mean saying that this is me, and, just as importantly, these things are not me. I would be open to judgement and criticism. My perspective would be open to commentary by others as either right or wrong. It would make little difference whether or not there is a right or wrong. Insecurity in my sense of what is right is my prime insecurity. In wanting to be right, I give up the ability to feel secure in my choices. To be right requires submission to an authority. The authority is always superior. Nobody will challenge my thoughts on a beer as I sit in my living room taking sips between these sentences.

A strong expression of self through clothes, appearance, or pursuit of a particular something, particularly when those things would make me stand out, shifts my position from observer to participant. Once I'm participating, I'm open to judgement, and that may mean rejection or criticism. Those are things that I just cannot abide, so I hang out in the shadows, blending in and repressing my vulnerabilities and emotional needs. I also have to ignore the needs of others. Noticing that somebody else in my life may need some reassurance would require me to make myself vulnerable and expose myself emotionally. That might hurt. It's easier just to watch. It's easier just to go along.

Why shouldn't I be accommodating to myself?

I was all set to really think about my superpower (my short handed way of saying the thing about me that give me an advantage when it comes to one on one combat), but the more I thought about it the more I realized that there really wasn't any value in spending much time on this topic. I don't need to figure out what I can do to take advantage of my strengths. I'm pretty much already doing it. Some personality test I took for some leadership training told me that I'm a Coordinating Observer and gave me some insights into what that meant. Based on what a Coordinating Observer is good at, I'm already doing things that take advantage of my strengths. (I'm a chemist after all. If I was in sales or some other more people centered thing, my responsibilities may not be aligned with my preferences.)

The bigger challenge is to accept what makes me me. Over the last few years I've written plenty of posts about bashing myself. I seem to come here to unload my self-loathing on a pretty regular basis. This post is a pretty good example of me being hard on myself. There is a pretty clear sense that I am in some way insufficient and that I am not measuring up to some external standard of what a man should be. That personality test I took describes people like me as accommodating. Accommodating is just another way of being the nice guy, which is what I'm ripping about myself in that post that I linked to.

Nice guys leave a trail of fading impressions is what I said in that post. Is that really what I think about myself? I leave a trail of fading impressions? That's all people take away from meeting me? Surely I'm not that insignificant, but clearly some part of me thinks that I am. Why do I have such a hard time accepting myself? I essentially rejected that personality test because I didn't think it described me. I'm not a perfectionist who always has to do things the right way and know the right answer. That's what I told myself as I read the report for the first time. Then I gave it to the wife and she said it was 85% accurate. How can I just reject it when the person in the world who knows me best says that it's a pretty accurate description of who I am?

So after much reflection, I can admit that, yes, I can be a bit of a perfectionist. I know that my MBA GPA will have a minimal impact on my career prospects, but I put tremendous effort into my classes to get good grades. I had to make my papers the best that I could make them. That's perfectionism. I spent months preparing for a test and applying to schools that I know I would never attend. That's me showing that I can get the right answers and do things the right way. I have guilt over how I used that time. Granted, it definitely wasn't the healthiest way for me to be me, but I shouldn't beat myself up for wanting to be demonstrate my competence and getting recognition for my efforts. The means do not automatically impugn the ends.

I do have a deep seated need to have the right answer. So many of the social shortcomings that I berate myself over are rooted in my uncertainty in how to act in certain situations and my reluctance to do something that might be perceived as wrong. I'm so rooted in the objective, it's hard for me to see that many people are perfectly happy making judgments based on their subjective point of view. I don't have to constantly meet some ideal. People just have to find me pleasing in some way. That's the scale that matters. That external other thing that I'm always worrying about isn't such a big deal to many people. The people closest to me have already told me in many ways that they like me and find me appealing in so many ways. Why should I question their opinion?

It's okay for me to be accommodating. That just means that I'm not a jerk. I don't have a inherent need to prove my dominance at every opportunity. My tactic is not to challenge everyone and dare them to knock me down. I'm happy to work with the people to around me to achieve our common goals. You get what you want and I get what I want. What's wrong with that?

The cavity

My wife always tells me that I think too much, but when she told me that again a few days ago, she added a new twist. Sometimes I should just do what I feel. I immediately thought about the times when my instincts were screaming at me to do something and the rational part of me stepped in and convinced me to do what I thought was best rather than what felt like the right thing to do. I have spent my life silencing the part of me that goes on what just seems right. I have willingly given up my feel for live in order to run everything through some kind of thinking process. It's not necessarily a rational process. Making sure that I'm not doing anything to put myself out there, to expose some vulnerability or giving somebody else a chance to make me feel bad about myself is what the thinking part of me always does. It's like a pathological need to always do what fits with my long held (and almost entirely unexamined) notion of who I am and how I should interface with the world.

It's really depressing for me to realize that a huge part of that unexamined idea of who I am is basically that I'm not worth other people's time and attention. I can't be friends with that person or share more about my thoughts and feelings because I just don't offer enough substance for somebody else to really want to engage with me in that way. Because I have no real regard for who I am just as I am, I give other people total control in determining how I should feel about myself. It makes sense that I don't trust myself to follow my feelings when I don't really hold myself in very high regard. All my thinking is me trying to come up with a way to trick the person I'm dealing with and get them to see not who I am but who I want them to see. If they saw the real me they would immediately lose interest. So when my feelings told me that somebody was interested in me, my mind would immediately say that that can't be right. Why would somebody be interested in me. I must be looking at this situation all wrong.

This view of myself does a pretty good job of explaining some of my more undesirable behaviors. My passivity is not a consequence of an absence of motivation, it's more an outcome of not feeling that my needs are worth other people's time. It's better for me to know what they want and try to be that rather than actively showing them who I am and letting them decide if that's something they like. I don't deserve the things I want when it comes to other people. Non-people things, on the other hand, are fair game. I can go after those things with plenty of zeal, especially when they reinforce the image that I want people to see when they interact with me. All that other stuff, where I went to school, what I studied, how many degrees I have, what kind of training I've undergone, might make up for my lack of real substance.

At the core, all these problems are really just a belief that my preferences and needs are not valid. The judgement of others is more important than any judgment that I make. My reading of a situation, especially when it comes to my relationships, can never be right. I don't get people, I don't understand these things. I have to be eager to please so people will like me. They're acceptance of me fills the cavity of regard that I choose not to fill myself.

Overseer

Have you ever wondered why something is cool? I hadn't thought much about it either. At least not until I read stuff by other people exploring the idea of what makes something cool. What started as a little thought game (my favorite way to disconnect from the mundane moments of living) has me thinking about why I've never thought of myself as cool. Well, it's really more about why I've never really thought that I even had the capacity to be cool. Which makes me wonder if I've ever really looked at myself in a largely objective and non-judgmental way. 

I look at the way I have treated my wife over the last few years. All the times that I trampled and stomped on her needs to pursue some vague notion of what I should be rather than just living with the way that I am. It's like I have this insidious internal overseer who makes sure that I don't get any ideas about leaving my assigned station. He's tasked with making sure that I stick to the script and don't try to convince myself that the image of the goofy, socially awkward, and undeserving bumbler may not be an accurate reflection of how other people experience me. 

I've accepted an image of who I am that undermines the most important relationships in my life. The social leper must always hide. People would never want to be with you the way you are so you can never let them know what you're thinking or feeling. You'll be ridiculed if you ever let the real you emerge. Keep that under wraps. Live in fear. I can't recall ever thinking these words explicitly. They're representations of a cluster of feelings and reactions. I look at how hard I worked to find out where people thought I should go and how eagerly I've scrambled to get into that place. School. Work. Success will never come unless I continue to push and strive to be more than I am now. Salvation lies out there somewhere. Who you are at this moment is never enough. But maybe things will be different in the future. 

I've given other people the power to make me feel good about myself. The more distant that person is from me, the better I would feel when they granted me their acceptance. They accepted the finely crafted and carefully honed version of me, the version of me that I built up over years of earning distinctions. I could hide behind distinctions. I wouldn't have to rely on anything personal. I've told myself that my success has been built on those distinctions. My failures are the result of my inherent insufficiency. All the proof that I need to confirm the influence of this inherent insufficiency on my engagement with the core of living, relationships, is my internal reaction to my wife's plea for affection. How can you expect me to give you something that I am incapable of offering? That was what I would hear in my head when she told me that she wanted to feel desired. I felt in my deepest depths that I was incapable of giving her that affection.

That's obviously not true. What I thought was my deepest depths were just fears and insecurities that were instilled in me years ago. I'm angry that I was made to feel that way about myself, but when I look at how the people who formed my world when I was so young feel about themselves and their place in the world, I realize that there was really no other way for me to view the world. I should be more angry at myself for passively sitting by and continually buying into this notion of who I am. The crazy thing is that I was given constant signals that other people did not experience me in the way that I thought they did. My overseer did a fantastic job of keeping me in line. The little fucker...