My song of myself

I am reading, as I have been reading each day for the past three snowed-in days as a sort of Scripture, a Joan Didion essay from a borrowed book – from a punishment book, actually, meant as corrective after a piece of writing I’d done that lacked all writerly virtues (sense of humor, sense of purpose, insightful observation) shamed me by appearing in print; intended, I think, to be a sort of mental laxative – “On Self Respect.”

It is the second of her personal essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I have not read the first – “On Keeping a Notebook” – yet, though I have read “On Morality,” which has taken a seat in my soul next to Helene Cixous’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing and “Those Bible.”

I am alone, at home, and it is Sunday afternoon, and I am learning self-respect.

I am not learning to do it so much as how to talk about it, and acting it out. Sitting alone at home on a Sunday afternoon, the day after going to a family gathering I had been dreading, the day after walking out of doors instead of staying to listen to grousing by people who have more to be grateful for than not, after going outside this morning to clear the dry snow off my car despite not going anywhere and not planning to, after wearing a favorite outfit but being seen by no one special, after the night-set dreams I had in which I took care of business left confused and semi-neglected in real life, I am aware of the background substance of self-respect, much different from self-indulgence or self-flagellation, and the ways in which I have learned it.

The beginning of self-respect, Joan Didion says, is being “driven back upon oneself” – being forced to view oneself as one is, and accept it.

“The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards – the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed.”

It’s difficult to help others understand oneself, particularly these sorts of things. It is difficult – and in my most desperate times I have allowed assumptions to pass without comment – to not indulge in recitations of apparent injuries, evidences of the wounds standing in for actual ones, to gain false pity.

No one is calling me a hero, so to protest that I’m not one at this point seems rather self-congratulatory. But I’m not doing that. I’m doing a far more self-congratulatory thing, which is saying I am one. I am one, but for invisible reasons, reasons that I suspect not many people can see right away.

I wrote several months ago that I wasn’t good at meeting new people, but that as a friend, I would get better, not to worry – it was a joke, much of the post, on me, but not that point. On that point I was dead serious.

It takes time to see my best character traits, and my beauty, I’m told, and when it happens it happens as a sort of illusion of collected knowledge – the whole that when it comes into view is inexplicably more than the sum of its parts. My good points are not remarkable except in concert with each other. My face and body are not beautiful except when accompanied by the expressions made familiar by love and time. I suspect this is how it is for many if not most people, though I wonder how many of them know it about themselves.

I know it, both that I often appear unremarkable and that I am unexpectedly better than I appear, in truth, in the knowing. I haven’t happened upon self-respect by accident, but I haven’t gained it on purpose in the ways one expects, either – I haven’t joined any clubs with which I’m proud to be associated, haven’t published any academic articles or held what I have published in high regard; I haven’t taken an undue interest in being a college graduate or having lived in China or having set out to learn new skills. It’s not fulfillment of my ambitions or even adherence to some internal lodestone that has given me self-respect.

It’s an increasing ability to care for myself that’s done it, even when I’ve gone off course – the course that God set for me, or one I’ve set for myself. It’s largely work I’ve done alone, and without much thought.

There are a few days in my life that I believe I will always remember as ebenezers – little piles of actions that sit one on the other like altar stones – and none are what they should have been. In college, freshman year, I stayed in one Saturday, all day, cleaned my half of the room and watched six hours of Star Trek Voyager that Tyler had taped off of television and sent to me on a video I still have, in a row; last year, I visited Debbie and, waiting for a cultural studies conference to begin, read Cixous’ Three Steps in one day; last month, I drove myself to Northampton, MA to see the as-yet-unwritten-about Matt & Kim show, alone.

All of these things are mine, things that I did, and alone. I walked myself to counseling my second year in DC, finding my way from the metro station to the church basement I talked out my problems in, learning the bus routes to get to work from there, listening to books on CD or squirrel sounds or music; I wandered the city picking up books, furniture, a holy-grail-like dim sum steamer, from Freecycle. I went to Tongxin Lu to look at DVDs or to Malan Noodles to get the niu-rou-bai-cai-yang-cong stir-fried noodles I special-ordered in China. I bought myself a hatchet and bit it into fallen trees in the woods at college.

There are other days, and other people, that I remember with more acute pleasure. Being able to turn, smiling, to someone else and ask “remember when we…” is one of the most delicious parts of friendship. Recitation of those times has a creedal weight and impact: “I believe in God the Father, and in my friends, with whom I have eaten, cried and fought, who I trust never to forsake me, without whom I would be lost.”

But if these are the characters and events that make my life bright and occasionally, unbearably joyful, fun, meaningful, the background is my self: what I choose to do on a Sunday afternoon at home, alone, and what I secretly recite then. My kind of greatness is not that I achieve things or discipline myself or have a spic-and-span, regret-free history. It’s that I’m beginning to evaluate and respect my failures as well as my successes, and accept them all.

“There is a common superstition that ‘self-respect’ is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation.”