Being ‘yourself’

Ever since early childhood, one piece of advice tends to be repeated to us over and over again. In terms of social interactions with others, with creativity, with most communication, the important thing - or so the adage goes - is to ‘just be yourself’. Manage this, we’re told, and children will be lining up to play with you, potential sexual partners falling all over themselves to get you in the sack, publishers begging to send you obscenely large advances, and so on.

And this pat little solecism is probably partially true - except for the bits it leaves out. First of all, who the fuck is this ‘yourself’ person who’s supposed to be so great? Identity is such a malleable thing, and most of the first 20+ years of our lives are spent trying to construct some kind of personal identity of the bits and pieces of our parents, teachers, friends, siblings, literary influences, genetic predispositions, and all the other random detritus that goes into making this incredibly messy, smudged, crowded slate we call our ‘mind’*. There is very little blank space we can write on, and nothing can ever be truly rubbed out, the best we can generally hope for is to rearrange these disjointed scraps of information in such a way as to create some kind of facsimile of the person we’d like to be.

The second problem, of course, is that nobody actually wants you to be yourself. They want you to be some combination of whoever society thinks you ought to be plus their own idiosyncratic, baggage-laden projection of who they think you ought to be, with a tiny soupçon of something safe yet slightly exotic, so that you can remain interesting without seeming too threatening. And they want you to project all this with an air of breezy self-confidence, like you really know what the hell you’re doing.

So how can one balance all these conflicting signals whilst filtering out the vast quantities of noise? How can we be all these different people we’re ’supposed’ to be, without betraying ourselves, whoever the fuck ‘ourselves’ actually are?

Oh, no, sorry, there’s no insightful answer or punchline to this one (though if it exists it might possibly be six multiplied by seven). That’s why I was asking you lot.

*see Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate if you don’t get this. It’s a flawed but interesting book.