A One Room Window
I am very insecure. I’m constantly in need of someone who will reassure me of my own intelligence. When I write something, I have to read it in front of people so I can tell by their initial, visceral reactions if it’s good or not. I don’t do this for purposes of revision and critique but because I need to be told that what I’ve written is funny, or smart, or witty, or good, or whatever. It’s an obsession, one that nourishes my psyche, and one without which I would cease to function normally.
But that last assessment brings into question the normality of my state of being if I’m in a perpetual cycle where my psychology is dependent on other people qualifying my work as good. I tell myself, out of habit and from some vague defense, that I’m simply unsure of the qualifications I give my own work; as the author, it’s difficult, so I tell myself, to judge with any measure the potency of my products. This, of course, is absolute bullshit. I know something is good right away and that’s the reason I read it aloud. I feed off of acceptance and compliments that I know I’ll receive. I turn that into the energy that keeps me going, keeps my mind in a sound condition.
But again, one must then question my soundness of mind if it’s wholly dependent on the positive judgments of others. I’m partially correct, though, when I say that I’m not qualified to measure my own work, but only in the sense that I’m not a good enough judge to say, with distinction, what a piece is worth. I can give a better than general estimation of the merits of a piece, but I can’t necessarily differentiate between great and excellent. I can most of the time, but not in every case, whereas I’m able to differentiate between great and average every time. Like any skill, it’s a work in progress.
I think sometimes that it’s natural to feed off of the support of others, to find nourishment and inspiration in their kind words, but I imagine that to say as much about my psychological insecurities is to spin them in a positive way, which is probably more than I ought to do. I suppose, though, that a realistic assessment of anyone’s psyche will produce an embarrassing framework, so maybe we all find nourishment in a different event, an event that we normally wouldn’t glorify. And perhaps my insecurities are no different than those belonging to friends and strangers alike. That isn’t to say we should accept them, but that, despite what I’m constantly longing to be told, I’m just like everyone else, at least in the sense that I’m psychologically inferior to whatever golden standard we might objectify.
But that’s what makes us human, I guess, that in a broad sense we’re less than perfect, and more particularly, we’re never fully aware of our own psychology, a psychology that is always unstable and weak. We may show strength at times, and even possess the stamina necessary to undergo traumatizing events without slipping into a psychological nightmare, but at some point, we’ll discover a weakness, a glaring one that seems to outweigh, or at least out-produce, the strengths. And in this, we are all brothers.
But maybe that’s another way of comforting myself, by saying that my mental infirmity is no more apparent than anyone else’s. By claiming brotherhood in some possibly fictitious community, maybe I feel better about being psychologically dependent on others (and, in my superficial mind, weak because of this).
I wonder, though, if this argumentation, this deliberate attack on my disposition, is detrimental to my overall well-being. Perhaps our irrationality is the one thing our rationality should keep away from, for maybe it’s the contradictions inside us that make life meaningful – and livable. If we’re entirely rational, life is robotic and without the guilty pleasures of knowledgeable sin, where you knowingly do something you think is wrong, if only because it feels good. But if we live life entirely irrational, we wouldn’t have the ability to recognize the distinctive pleasures each event gives in life: every pleasurable event feels the same. We’d also, I imagine, spiral into a web of chaos that no amount of external intervention could abate.
Maybe I can explain this through example: In my logic class, which is purely concerned with rational ideas, we were learning how to identify relationships in a symbolic language we were using called predicate logic. We were translating English sentences concerning loving into this language, and a guy made a mistake in how he formed a sentence. He said Lxy (x loves y) instead of Lyx (y loves x), which he thought were the same. To this thought our professor replied “It is the tragedy of the human condition that loving is neither a reciprocal nor symmetric relationship.”
Here we were, some forty of us, sitting in a class applying the rational parts of our minds to a task requiring absolute precision and abstract detachment, and we were presented with a thought that was grounded in the irrationality of human psychology and relationships. To fully appreciate the entirety of our professor’s statement, we had to take equal parts rational and irrational and see every side. On one hand, it’s logically true, in the universe of discourse we were dealing with, that loving was not symmetric, that just because x loves y, y doesn’t necessarily love x. And on the other hand, it’s a wholly realistic concept that required, additionally, our irrational selves to identify the irony and find pleasure in such a statement. It reminded me that at any given moment, we may have to call upon both halves of our minds, though they stand in contradiction, in order to understand the world and those around us.
So it’s probably the case that my insecurities are less than desirable and that a more ruthlessly efficient life might be lived outside of them, but I think I’ll stick with them, knowing that the kind of meandering, awkward, and at times depressing journey I wish to take is right at my fingertips.
