A photo I took of Mont Saint-Michel in France. Winter 2022.
I wrote this very brief essay on a flight from Phoenix to Washington, reflecting on Joan Didion’s “On Self-Respect” – an essay of hers from Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
It’s easy to deceive others; to put up an attractive image of who we want others to see us as. While human nature is at least hard to bend, our individual personalities and selves – the whole of what we can rightly call ourselves, what differentiates Sam from Bob – are remarkably formable and shapeable. If we pretend to be a certain person for long enough, we shouldn’t be surprised when we genuinely start to become that person. This can manifest in productive ways: I can seek to be perceived as a more disciplined and fatherly man, therefore I will form habits and organize my actions such that I genuinely become such a strong person.
On the contrary, and far more often the case than not, we only take the steps to look and seem like a certain kind of person, never the steps to actually become the ideal we imagine. The reason this temptation is so strong is because our motivation is primarily oriented towards others, and their perception of us. We seek the simulacrum of virtue, not the thing itself.
We seem to forget, again and again, that it’s us – only us, only you, only me – who has to occupy that mind and body of ours. Upon birth, you were granted, and are granted every day, stewardship over your soul. Social creatures, we are constantly pressured to conform our inner lives and selves to the approval others (others, by the way, stuck in the same dilemma). We are the blind being led by the blind, trusting that someone, anyone, knows what’s going on. No one does.
Social media and our continually accelerating “interconnectedness” – a strange interconnection to be sure, for we are more connected and more lonely than ever; we are all together, alone – only worsens these patterns. Our social media feeds can conceal all the rough patches of our lives, all of our ticks and idiosyncrasies (besides being disingenuous, how boring!: the stuff of life is the chance encounter, the adorable way the girl you like stutters when she’s nervous, the tap-tap-tap of your friend’s foot against the floor that betrays his insistence that he’s not tense).
At least in-person some of our deception can be stripped bare. The newly rich financier seeking to portray himself a scion of old money gives away his true self when his eyes light up just one notch too brightly at some cheap wine that happens to carry a fancy name.
A keen eye can begin to spot this deception even in the carefully curated, algorithmically fine-tuned, heavily edited realm of Instagram and Twitter. But really, this is beyond the point: we are all in on the fraud.
We all see through our shallowness, through the meticulous images we build for ourselves, unparalleled by the public relations strategies diligently prepared by several generations ago’s corporate advertisers and celebrity press assistants. We are all living dream lives, and we all know that we are feeding ourselves lies. Our dreams are others’ dreams, and we dance perilously close to nightmare. We believe that we will find fulfillment by perfectly catering to others’ tastes (oh, how fickle those are; what a game of mirrors we have chosen to play!), putting up the perfect image of our personalities and selves on full display.
When the day comes to a close, and we put our phones away so that we can lay under the sheets, we are given a quick moment of reprieve. If we allow our minds to slow down, and our constant seeking of others’ praise – did she view my story? what do you think that friend group thought of my post? does he finally take me seriously? – to abate for perhaps only half-a-minute, we will be stripped bare before ourselves. The image will melt away, and you’ll be left with yourself. I pray that in these sacred moments of silence, if I find the courage to enter them, I am able to recognize the person before and beneath the image I’ve built.
Self-deception is vicious, a ravenous vulture pecking away at his own guts until there is nothing left. Self-deception drains our sails of their wind, which is truth, and either leaves us alone at sea or full of hot air that leads us far astray from the sort of people we are meant to be.
Against our will, we are masters of our souls. What a terrible accident! What a heavy burden! What is this world that we are given command over such previous cargo as a human soul? But we have been given this great commission, and the longer we run from it through the hollow pursuit of other souls’ praise, the longer we deny ourselves, ourselves. We refuse to give ourselves back to ourselves, and here lies the problem at the core of our lives.
It takes genuine courage to walk naked in front of yourself, laid bare before a captive audience. This bravery – often practiced, never easy, and always worthwhile – is the foundation for our fulfilment. Didion would say that it is also the foundation for our character, and therefore our self-respect.
This discovery lends special weight to the Christian notion that God knows each of us better than we know ourselves. Perhaps one avenue of understanding what the eternal bliss of salvation consists of is this: that one day, by the grace of God, we will know ourselves as well as God already knows each of us. This brutal, uncomfortable, discomfiting confrontation with the truth of things – represented most vividly in Christ’s Crucifixion – is the key to our salvation.
In Heaven, we will see ourselves and all those whose empty applause we sought on Earth as we truly are, as God sees us. We will not be our meticulously crafted Instagram feeds, nor our public personas, nor the masks we wear, but the real people we happen to be prior to our image; the real people we either choose to become or run from in pursuit of hot air and empty seas.