On Self Respect
“Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.”
Joan Didion, “On Self Respect”, 1961
For the last few years, I have not done anything I did not particularly want to do, and thus, I have not particularly had any self respect.
Just before Christmas a few years back, I fled what I saw to be the hyper-capitalistic United States for a more interesting life in Mexico. It was a few months after having the Second Great Awakening of my life– the first being spiritual, the second, socioeconomic. I had begun reading Chomsky, Freire, and Bookchin, all enlightening me to the fact that something very sinister was taking place in the world around us. I didn’t want any part in it, and I needed to decamp from the epicenter of injustice to take some time to think.
While in Mexico, I did not want to work on any project I did not believe in. “Work I Did Not Believe In” included just about anything that I perceived to be too small of an effort to radically shift the course of history and alter the consciousness of billions of humans. Thus, I was unemployed.
I spent the better half of the last two years thinking, reading, writing, and thinking again. I would become involved in an endeavor for roughly 7-12 days at a time before deciding that it was not exactly right. Never once did I consider the notion of doing something I did not particularly want to do. I was on a never-ending pursuit of my Purpose, the work I was meant to do above all other work, the chimera dangled in front of me in self-help books and spiritual Venn diagrams.
In social settings, my most dreaded question was, “What do you do for work?” How could I explain that I had opted out of working altogether? That I was somehow both ambition-less and harboring the highest ambition of all? These people, perhaps doing something they did not particularly want to do, perhaps possessing a great deal of self respect, would simply not understand.
In these moments, my own lack of self respect came creeping in. “However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves,” Didion wrote. And I was awake, night after night, trying to figure out a righteous path to pursue, as the magic 8 ball repeatedly surfaced, “Ask again later.”
The judgment that something was deeply unjust in the world, and that I was not doing anything about it, clouded every day, every interaction. It was only a few weeks ago that the cloud began to lift, thanks, in part, to Didion. In reading her collections of essays, After Henry, and Slouching Towards Bethlehem, I was struck by her time capsule of life as it was in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.
More than anything else, she was an observer, and she allowed her observations to speak for themselves. Rather than plainly stating judgements or analysis, she carefully shaped them through what she chose to observe, and how she structured the observation– its composition and where it lay in the story– allowing the reader to infer her opinion, and to perhaps see through to the disordered nature of society itself.
In her time capsule of observations, I perceived that there was so much to learn, so much to remember, and that simply observing the world as it is could be just as impactful, albeit in a different sense, than toiling to change society so radically. It was through her accounts of politics and power that I realized some of the bigshot change-makers are actually doing very little to make change, and it is often the hidden figures of daily life that shape the world around us.
This realization was mirrored a bit later when I became interested in the documentary photographs of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston. Pioneers of color photography, they created monumental odes to everyday life. What was perceived as uninteresting at the time is now fascinating to contemporary Americans living within a very different picture of society. Again, I contemplated that observations of life as it is could be just as powerful as trying to convince everyone else of Utopia.
Looking back, it seems that there have been many singular individuals who worked hard to make change, but the changes were only widely accepted when popular consciousness supported them. It’s as if the ball of fate is pre-calculated to drop only when there is enough momentum. “Where forced social changes were not nourished by an educated and informed popular consciousness, they were eventually enforced by terror,” Bookchin wrote. I wondered if these observations of daily life, so carefully composed, could slowly educate and inform popular consciousness. Should I just begin to observe life as it is, hoping that others see through the disorder to recognize that change is needed?
If that were the case, it would certainly mean a better life for me. Less agonizing about doing the most impactful thing, more meeting Life where it’s at. Less judging myself for a lack of discipline, more taking action in ways that seem achievable. And most importantly, I did not have to be the one to reinvent the wheel, I could look to accounts of daily life in the past for guidance.
The jury is still out on my self-judgment. Sometimes I still ponder the greatest possible impact, but I do feel more presence and peace as I write out my lists of daily observations, filled with disorder, nonsense, and the comedies of errors in our world. I tell myself that doing something is better than nothing. And late at night, I think of Didion’s line, “...by putting fears and doubts to one side.” I put my fears and my doubts to one side, as I once again begin to nurture my own steady stream of self respect.