Slouching Toward Self-Respect
What can be learned from re-reading Joan Didion’s Personals In 2024
Recent years online have brought around a resurgence of ‘Didion Fever’ as young women in particular praise Didion as a messiah and fore fronter for ‘hot girl literature’ , in many instances her aptly aesthetic book covers are shot into the pictures of hot readers everywhere. With such a boom in Didion fever I read back over a collection of Didion’s works to see if she could teach me as a young woman in 2024.
I could never quite connect with the bland narrative, loose plot of Didion’s fiction, as much as I always really wanted to, so I opted for Didion’s ‘Personals’ , found in the latter half of ‘Slouching toward Bethlehem.’ In many cases there is something to be learnt from anyone’s personal writings, but I found myself touched by two in particular (1) On Keeping a Notebook and (2) On Self Respect. The latter the most famous, and most universally applicable, and the former for what it meant for me as a mercurial person.
On keeping a Notebook:
If we are keeping with the theme of what Didion’s personals can teach us specifically in this new modern age then nothing seems more apt than Didion’s emphasis on keeping a notebook. In a life increasingly polluted with the noise of technology we are naturally inclined toward short form scrolling and quick dopamine releases.
Instant gratification is the new norm, and with this has come the dissolution of a true connection with the self. For Didion, however, keeping a notebook aids us with this ever salient need to remain connected to our internal noise.
Didion claims that a notebook is not necessarily just to keep a factual record of reality, and instead her diaries are full of what some may call lies. ‘I have always had trouble distinguishing between what had happened and what merely might have happened.’ In typically sardonic fashion Didion details a collection of events that may or may not have been obscured by her own fantastical narratives. It’s an amusing passage, but simultaneously inspiring.
Didion’s whimsy ushers us to let go of the tight reins of factual persistence — at least with ourselves. In a world so orderly, so precise, if we cannot be fantastical and exaggerative (unfortunately not a real world) with ourselves, then when can we be? A notebook is the conduit to be silly and intimate with oneself unabashedly.
What Didion’s essay really gets at is that the value of keeping a notebook is how it feels to you. If we are to keep a notebook out of habit, routinely filling it up with facts, then the end result is a journal that has been drained of all the mystique and wonder of the everyday.
“We are brought up in the ethic that others ,all others, are by definition more interesting than ourselves. Only the very young and very old may recount their dreams at breakfast, dwell upon self. The rest of us are expected to affect absorption in other peoples trot” (p136)
For Didion our notebooks give us away in this facade. However much we can record all of the pollution of other people in our life, our notebooks will only ever have one denominator; ‘shamelessly the impeccable “I” (p136)
In a world where the only form of acceptable selfishness is that which results in some sort of capitalist or interpersonal gain, a world where one must suspend themselves in the constant flux of being in ‘networking mode’ the irreplaceable ‘I’ is being neglected. So often do we perform routine out of selflessness masquerading as selfishness.
Didion’s personals can certainly help us in situating our selfish self affections better. As young people when you cannot yet comprehend who you truly are, it is easy to bloat your mind with thoughts of other people and confuse them as your own something and with all of these external opinions polluting our surroundings perhaps it is our journal that an aid us in determining what is truly important.
Didion’s writing doesn’t inspire us to keep a journal for deep introspection nor for factual documentation but to keep in touch with our own whimsy our own preferred falsehoods.
As we find our footing in the world it becomes second place to situate our self worth around the contours of other people’s boring facts and Didion’s ‘On keeping a notebook’ inspires us to do the opposite, to fall in love with the selfishness of our own imagination.
On Self Respect:
What does it mean to cultivate a strong sense of self respect and maintain it throughout your twenties? Depending on who is trying to sell you what the answer often differs. But what remains annually present is that nagging question; ‘Did I truly, really, respect myself, my boundaries, or other people the year before?
For young women self deception seems like a necessary in developing self respect.
‘Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that ones likes oneself.’ (p.142)
The attempt to discern self respect from self trickery is an elusive, embarrassing task. But Didion’s essay tells us to reflect on our grandparents to help us along the way.
Our grandparents are the ‘ real pioneers of self respect, instilled in them is a certain discipline, a sense that one lives by doing things one particularly does not want to do, by putting fears to one side, weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, intangible comforts’ (pp.145)
What Didion alludes to, and continually alludes to across her personals is the concept of deferred gratification. That idea that if you just wait, suspend yourself in the process, the movement, but not the moment, then self respect will be fostered. Didion affirms self respect as a form of discipline , a habituation that takes on an almost saturnian figure throughout our lives. Just as we think we have mastered self respect, a new destructive habit pops up that forces us to re-evaluate, often coming to the conclusion that we’re just not all that great.
Young people in particular are predisposed toward Didions ‘alienation from the self’, its our second nature to plug in always. Plug in to technology, to noise, to external opinion, and in doing so our self respect essentially dwindles. We do not take consideration and time for ourselves, we alienate ourselves from from our true nature and in repeatedly doing such, under Didion’s view we have lost self respect.
We all can look at our screen times, our attention etc. and understand that we aren’t truly connecting to the highest part of ourselves, but Didion lays it out firmly here. Didion puts to rest the idea that self-respect is a kind of spiritual panacea that takes way all of our problems. Instead, she remedies it as a treaty of sorts that we make with ourselves to best come to terms with who we want to be in the world. And as young women in particular there is something integral to be grasped by Didion’s ‘On Self Respect.’
