Just born
A phrase from Dickinson’s third Master letter has been popping into my head a lot recently:
“God made me— Sir— Master— I did’nt be— myself—”
What an odd thing to say. I didn’t be myself. She goes on, with an arresting image:
“I dont know how it was done— He built the heart in me— Bye and bye it outgrow me— and like the little mother— with the big child— I got tired holding him—”
I’ve never known exactly what to do with Dickinson as a reader, and she regularly makes me glad I’m not a 19-c Americanist. I can’t say that what she wrote and what I feel when I read it have anything to do with one another, except that she taps into a very weird place in me, and some of her phrases pop into my mind, unbidden, and stay there for weeks or months. Since last November or so, every time my mind quiets down, there’s this indignant voice saying “I did’nt be— myself—,” and I don’t know why.
My whole life has been roughly conducted on the principle that I can create my own life and alter myself in fundamental ways. From the time I was a little baby, the record shows massive changes in my behavior and attitude upon greater socialization. For my first nine months, I didn’t smile or interact with people. Then, suddenly, I became the sunniest infant ever and gave no more trouble. Over time, I reverted and got weird again, and then found a way back out upon starting kindergarten. Sixth grade was another big shake-up, as were seventh, ninth, and eleventh. Each time, I found myself getting increasingly distant and unmanageable, and did something to force myself into a new social situation in which I’d be accountable to someone.
So, on the one hand, I have all this proof that I do, in fact, get better at stuff. I’m never perceived as “shy” now, which I often was as a kid (when it was usually resentful brooding silence). I do work I never would have considered within the realm of possibility for me ten years ago, when I was a happy lab rat, tapping on my TI-85. I’m learning a lot more than I thought I was capable of about myself as a person, and I react with more sympathy to people I wouldn’t have in the past. Yadda yadda, I think of myself as a better person than I used to be, because of all the ground I feel I’ve covered. But then sometimes I become aware that, no, I haven’t changed at all, not in any deep sense. I see home movies of myself as a toddler and there I am, frustrated, confused, aversive, and then, at the next moment, wildly charming and affectionate for a flash at a time.
A couple of weeks ago, SSW and I were in her kitchen, watching her two (very different, wonderful) daughters walk in and out of the dining room. She sighed and said, “I think people are just born who they are.” Normally, when I hear people say this, I get sort of punchy and annoyed. I have a lot invested in my ability to change, fundamentally, in huge ways, because it’s how I’ve narrated my life to myself up to this point. I was a certain thing, and then I changed. But SSW has a way of saying things and making them sound true.
What if my life isn’t just a set of choices? What if everything I do to jerk myself out of an antisocial funk is just the same set of tricks I’ve always had with me? What if I’m not getting better after all, and just moving through the same cycles I always have, sometimes with more effective coping mechanisms than at other times?
One of my constant arguments with my mother is the one we have about who I was as a child in comparison to who I am now. To her, I’ve always been exactly the same person: funny except when I’m humorlessly indignant, easygoing when I’m not intellectually obsessive, empathetic when I’m not coldly judgmental, affectionate except when I’m meaninglessly withholding, and absolutely pliant when I’m not stubbornly resolved against something. Until recently, I’ve been working on the assumption that she is wrong, that I am at least capable of changing, if I haven’t changed yet. I don’t know what it was that altered my thinking on this, other than a series of fairly typical events in which I bumped up against the wall of my own personality.
I often get annoyed with my mother when she talks about her weight. She is short and obese, and has been about the same weight for 22 years. She’s otherwise healthy, eats wisely, and really does get exercise, so it’s not like some big quality-of-life problem for her. She’s not grotesque, and is quite cute, with pretty brown hair and ice-blue eyes. But she’s been mortified, every day for 22 years, about being fat. Her whole self-conception is bound up with some future relationship she will have with her body when she loses weight. For years, I’ve been trying to get her to stop acting like her “real” life is some parallel existence in which she’s thin, or off in the future somewhere after she drops eighty pounds. I keep urging her to see that this is the life she’s got, one in which she’s heavy, and worrying about how everyone on earth might react to that weight is immaterial, because it’s not like there’s another her out there that they’re not acknowledging. There’s just this one, and she’s fine.
On this trip out with her, I was struck dumb by my own hypocrisy on this issue. I get annoyed with my mother for failing to accept herself as something other than her own ideal, but, quite clearly, I do this all the time with my image of my own personality. I am aware that I’m often not a good person, and that I cause people all kinds of pain by being withholding and clumsy and mean. But it’s as if I have been so certain that one day I’ll wake up and be different, make myself different, that I don’t really accept people’s reactions to me as I am now. And for some reason, I’ve ignored the very old patterns that go way back into childhood because I couldn’t believe that was any more “me” than the child next to me in a photo.
If one is “just born,” to some degree, as one is, what does one do about it?
As a ‘faithful’ reader of your blog, this particular post really voices something I’ve been thinking about lately.
I guess it’s true that we are “just born as we are,” to a certain degree. To me, the big difference between myself now, and myself as a child, is that I’ve gotten a better grip on “who I am” and that I’ve learned to shape my life around that. Not entirely, of course, as not everything that “I am” is good or beneficial. But all in all I think shaping my environment around my quirky self was one of the best decisions I’ve made.
We are “just born as we are.” I see in my own children that there are tendencies, traits and quirks present since before they took their first breath. Parents, teachers and other external factors shape how we deal with our little idiosyncrasies but ultimately, as we age, we chose the people we end up being. It’s not about changing. You are not a light bulb. Is change possible? Absolutely- but it’ll take concentrated effort and some time.
I think changing one’s personality is like quitting smoking. You can quit and be a non-smoker, absolutely. But you’ll always remember that part of you that smoked, what it was like, what were the desires and emotions. You’ll always relate to that ex-part of you, even if you no longer let it play out in reality.
Like smoking, too, in that you may have to keep quitting, over and over, before it really sticks. And even then you may fall off the wagon now and then. Those patterns, those cycles, really are habits, and breaking the ones you don’t like so you can be the person you choose to be is hard.
I’ve always thought of them as habits. But is it possible that some of them are real limitations to be respected? I guess I fear I tend to moralize at myself in ways that are not getting me anywhere, because I still pull the same shit I did when I was 10. Is fighting that impulse more like quitting smoking and still always wanting a cigarette, or is it more like deciding to be celibate rather than a practicing homosexual?
You’re imperfect. Just like the rest of us. The more you moralize, the worse you’re going to seem.
Maybe who you are is a person that’s never quite satified with yourself?
“If one is “just born,” to some degree, as one is, what does one do about it?” I am taking this as a blatant request for advice!
Talk a lot to people who like you just the way you are. Find out what it is they like and value about you. You may be surprised by what you find!
Each time to do something, say something or think something you don’t like, simply notice that and then let it go.
Actively nurture the parts of you that you do like.
Hang out with people who like you and who you like.
Sometimes the things we don’t like about ourself are things that we do which in another situation would be considered a quality.
And finally, as probably your oldest reader and venerable old hippy chick I reserve the right to be cheesy - learn to love yourself!
There’s too much to think about with this. I would say that you are both the way that you are and the way that you are dissatisfied with the way that you are.
I guess you have given a good example with your mother of how being dissatisfied with the way that you are can be a dead end. But it does annoy me at times when people try to block my attempts at self-improvement. Maybe because I am thinking: Geez, if I gave up that, what would I do? Just exist?
Lately I’ve been thinking (as a kind of joke): Just how hard would it be to give up the ego altogether, the illusion that I have a self at all? Because that would be THE MOST AWESOME KIND OF SELF IMPROVEMENT I CAN IMAGINE! It’s a joke because that is probably also the most difficult thing of all. But I like to aim high.
Is it possible Dickinson meant what we would punctuate as “I didn’t be, myself”? That is, “I didn’t just create myself”? The next sentence is “I dont know how it was done.” I don’t think she’s talking about whether she was stably herself, but of how she came to be.
That said, the fixity of one’s nature is also a perennial question. Part of what’s distinctive about your blog persona is that you express a fluctuant improvisational self-fashioning with a willed confidence and composure.
Yes, Vance, that’s how I interpret it, too. This was perhaps not clear in my comment.
(In that, over the past few months, I keep wanting to explain to people that I didn’t choose to be this awful person that I am, that I just am, but I’ve never bought that line from anyone else before and I wonder why it’s so comforting now.)
Long ago, a friend told me that in Africa, when she expressed a mild religious skepticism, people asked, “So who made you?” as if that were a knock-down argument for faith. I take Dickinson to be doing the same (though not as a complacent conversation-stopper).
No, we aren’t literally our own creators, at least not in the rigid sense that would require us to exist prior to our creation; nor were we formed in a flash with identities that persist till death (or beyond). But those aren’t the only two choices, people!
In Nigeria, anyhow, the Yoruba traditionally believed that one chose one’s own head before being born, so if you’re crazy, it’s your own damn fault. Sometimes I do feel like I chose a bad head.
I’m always surprised by how much of what I come to dislike about myself is revealed to me by someone telling me something about myself that I absolutely reject — until I realize that it’s exactly accurate. Introspection is never a solitary process for me. It’s initiated by someone else, usually someone I love, narrating my actions back to me. My husband, for instance, showed me how regularly I refused to apologize. I thought that what I was doing by explaining instead of apologizing was more emotionally honest and more difficult. I came to realize that “I’m sorry” was far more satisfying for both of us than a long story about why I was acting like a brat and a lot harder to say.
This seems right to me, NQAO, though perhaps because this is something you and I have discussed at length. The missing piece here, though, is what I see as the problem of intimacy. The more intimate we are with people, the less we are likely to even notice their faults, much less talk about them. I often feel like I come to you, for example, with a problem I’m trying to deal with in myself, or a situation I don’t know how to handle, and you encourage my instincts because they don’t seem strange to you anymore, or because you empathize so well. I need that, but it’s also one of the reasons I’m compelled to talk to strangers (as well as friends) about things. They don’t give a shit about my feelings and have no particular investment in my happiness over anyone else’s. Maybe I’ll do a post about this next. Hm.
“this awful person that I am”!!!! Bloody hell AWB - you’re no better or worse than most people - do you actually like the idea of being so awful or something??? You’re certainly not ordinary or conventional but that’s no reason to beat yourself up.
[wanders off shaking her head...]
I would venture to guess I know myself just slightly better than my blog readers do, if I can say that without giving offense. I very much limit what of my actual life I talk about here, and life as it is thought is always more noble-sounding than life as it is lived.
And I certainly don’t mean to compare myself to other people. Everyone is an individual with their own problems, and I’m aware of that. But, as is clear here, I’m not fond of using consensus and norms as ways of determining value.
No offence taken - I was probably speaking out of turn anyway. It’s not that I think I know you just that I spend my time teaching a module where we get the students to think about people beyond a condition or diagnosis and question the notion of a fixed ’self’ so I tend to filter my mind through that, maybe as you do through literature.
I have no doubt you sometimes do dreadful and cringeworthy things! Just don’t like the notion of ‘being an awful person’ which is so damning.