The stories we tell ourselves
the blessing and curse of believing we can be who we want to be
Sometimes I think the desire to make an impact on the world is inherently narcissistic, it almost as if one needs to be having some delusion of oneself in order to believe that we are capable to be making a dent in the world. Other times, I feel like it is my way of coping. I am not sure how or why I should exist, so trying to work for the benefit of the greater whole is my drug of choice. I don’t like myself enough to exist for myself, so I try to exist for other people.
I think the blessing and curse of humanity is the capacity to be who we believe we are. If we believe we are capable of being Steve Jobs one day, perhaps we can, because the belief needs to exist for doors to open for us. On the converse, if we believe we are a piece of trash, we will make choices that will reinforce that we are a piece of trash. Why even try? The development of a human personality, is a self-reinforcing cycle that is partially perpetuated by the fragments of other people’s perceptions of us.
A good friend recently told me that she never had the imposter syndrome and she didn’t understand why other people like myself struggle with it so much. Here is my theory. I think it is some genetic makeup that determines how strong our sense of self is. For me, some part of my sense of self was missing, so I never really understood survival, and I depended on other people to form my own perception of my personality. If someone of authority told me I was lazy, I believed I was lazy. Perhaps some other part of me didn’t believe so, and that caused some level of indignation, but my sense of self was not strong enough to overcome someone else’s judgment. It resulted in a complex resentment of myself and of other people. I resented myself for being lazy because someone else told me so, I resented myself for letting someone else tell me I was lazy, I also resented other people for perceiving me that way, because there was some other part of me who wanted to rebel against that so called truth.
How complex our personalities can be.
It took me years to realize I am capable of forming my own narrative. I can be as lazy as I want, and or work as much as I want. I believe I don’t have a choice to self-destruct, so I need to give myself a reason to not only live, but be truly alive. Typical incentives like power doesn’t motivate me — sometimes I wish it did, it would make life much easier — I mean, honestly, I am so aware of my self-resentment that I don’t have the energy to accumulate more resentment for myself by lording over other people, at least consciously. I think being the underdog myself for so much of my life made me keenly aware of how painful it is to feel disempowered by people exerting authority, and my reaction to that is to disown as much power as possible, even within myself.
It is something I am really struggling to reconcile, my natural tendency to be repelled by anything that remotely resembles a power struggle, and the intellectual knowing that the participation may be necessary if I am really serious about making a dent on the world. How do you try to build a world capable of re-distributing power more effectively (knowledge, capital, resources), without breaking down existing power structures? We can’t break down existing power structures by not recognizing our own power to do so.
My skepticism of myself allows me to question myself over and over again. I recognize the flaws in my personality, and I wonder if the work I am trying to do or the person I think I am, is just one giant lie I tell myself.
But maybe that is the whole point. That we are capable of making that conscious choice over and over again. Yes, I am flawed, I may be lazy at times and selfish other times, I am incapable of taking care of any other living thing including plants, so sometimes I think it is very hypocritical of me to think I love the world when I cannot even bring myself to love one thing (that includes myself). Yet having one broken fragment of my personality does not exclude another part of me from existing.
It makes me believe that someone like Steve Jobs who was a terrible person to some people doesn’t mean he didn’t genuinely love the world. We want to believe people are either good or bad, light or dark, that we are not hypocrites. That someone who is vegetarian cannot possibly be sexist, or someone who works at Wall Street must love squeezing pennies out of people.
Perhaps we all possess both light and darkness within ourselves, that we are all trying to make educated choices based on context, that we are all capable of making terrible mistakes, but every new moment is an opportunity to make another conscious choice, to build the narrative we want for ourselves.
That is the power we have as human beings, our birth-right — the right to co-create the stories we want to tell ourselves.
Sometimes I think I am a piece of trash, sometimes I wish I didn’t have to exist, but other times I too, think I am capable of making a contribution to this world I both love and resent at the same time.
I can only hope, at the end of it all, the sum of it all makes sense.
