Want to hear me pontificate about myself? Who doesn’t love that kind of thing? No, seriously, this isn’t narcissism. I wrote the following entry as I was trying to analyze and understand myself. I don’t know why anyone else would care about that. But maybe it could serve as an example for self reflection? Is that even more narcissistic?
I took a personality test recently, a pretty good one. It’s strange, I show up as a somewhat disagreeable person (average for a man), highly creative, highly intellectual, and very unconscientious. That probably explains a lot about why I don’t do well fitting into structures and why I’m not as successful as I could be.
I think I’m fairly conscientious by training and by choice. But not by nature. Being smart helps make up for that, since I can usually figure something out to save myself in an amount of time that most people could never pull off. My cleverness gets me out of a lot of scrapes my lack of character got me into. People like my wife just never get into them.
But I’ve wondered sometimes if I’m a bit cowardly too. I probably am, and a bit lazy. I’m a little unwilling to stick my neck out and risk getting into a conflict. I’m not especially agreeable, I don’t feel compelled to get on board with what other people think or want, but I also don’t want to bother fighting to make them think what I think or do what I want. I don’t like putting my own neck on the line and I don’t care enough to get involved.
I don’t like confrontation or controlling other people. I’m very conflict-avoidant. And I’m also just a bit soft. I get very emotional about things, even if I don’t show it. And I’m not a naturally angry or dominant person. I’m much nicer than you might expect. I’ve held come employees, male and female, while they cried, including one who was two to three times as big as me. I notice very fine details about the people I care about, even if I often don’t directly look at lots of other people. I’m extremely cuddly and affectionate and passionate. I’m deeply moved by music and movies and shed tears very easily. I don’t make personal statements of feeling often because I get too emotional and feel too vulnerable.
My wife often makes fun of the way I unconsciously emote along with the characters in the movies. I guess I do a lot of mirroring, which is a very prosocial thing to do and fairly empathetic, despite the fact that I’m a very emotionally restrained and controlled person. I just don’t like being manipulated or forced I to playing a role or feeling a feeling without my consent and without it being earned. I have very strong feelings, so perhaps that’s a protective instinct.
As much as I want to confront people and test ideas, and as much as I appreciate watching other people debate, I’m not sure I could do it. I think in part because I’m just too tenderhearted. My dad has told me many times that I have an especially sensitive conscience, particularly so out of all his kids, and I never really understood that and have often argued against that assertion. But how we see and understand ourselves is often different from how others see us. And sometimes they have insights we lack.
I’ve always thought of myself as being a bit selfish and mercenary. I like to think through all kinds of possibilities that most conscientious and decent people wouldn’t even consider. I sympathize with criminals quite a bit, and the worst ones the most of all. In fact if I was to be a criminal, I can’t see any point in being a petty thief. Such transgressions would hardly be worth the effort, and would be a waste of moral freedom. If you’re going to violate norms, you may as well push it to the limit and lay claim to as much territory as possible.
The part of me that really like exploring and understanding and testing the limits of the abyss are able to imagine that I could really do some awful things. But that leaves out the other side of me. The very tender side that really doesn’t like to fight or see anyone in pain. I think being bullied as a child, rather than giving me a taste for retribution, instead gave me an inherent reprehension for needless cruelty.
I’m human, so I can get very angry and very depressed and deranged. Anyone can, under the right conditions. And I have felt possessed by destructive rage, avarice, envy, resentment, and lust. Degrees of them that seemed to possess me and fill me up so I couldn’t contain anything else and it felt like they were just going to burst out of the top of my head and take control of me.
But such possessions rarely last very long, and are always restrained and resisted by something in me, some residual psychic safety valve, a bit like that switch in your brain that keeps you from acting out what you do in your dreams. And once I calmed down I very swiftly regretted and repudiated my feelings of a moment before. I would wake up, and the dominant intelligence would reassert control over the monster, as Ted Bundy put it.
His problem is that he actively wanted to suppress the intelligence and release the monster, and he took serious steps to help it, such as heavy drinking. And I have always avoided such things like the plague, because I don’t want to ever not be in control of my own faculties. That’s about all I have, in the end; the manner in which all this that is me hangs together. What’s the good of knocking all that to bits and then having to live in reintegration with the consequences of what the disintegrated parts of me did while the totality of me was absent? That’s a recipe for trapping yourself in a need to continually inhabit a limbo of disintegration and suppression, so your complete, fully conscious self won’t have to live with it. So I have a horror of surrendering any part of my intellectual autonomy and control. And that’s protected me.
I think I am a much more sensitive person than I give myself credit for. But I’ve concealed and controlled it so well that I’ve fooled myself. It would explain a lot about my behavior. I can see it in my marriage. I’m not naturally neurotic or prone to negative emotions or melancholy, but I feel things very very deeply. I can be hurt very deeply. I can be deeply needy. Deeply passionate. Deeply disappointed. Deeply hopeful and fearful.
I think the tendency of things to go well for me in life (despite the bullying and widespread rejection by women and poor health in my youth and whatnot) aligned with my natural optimism and passion to keep me pretty calm and confident and happy for most of my childhood. And I had great parents. I cannot overstate how great my parents were. My joy was so deep and strong that the trials and tribulations of daily life weren’t unable to affect me much.
But then I had my first really serious heartbreak and I came apart a bit. My whole system started to work against me. I recovered and matured, I believe. And I was able to be courageous and optimistic again. But I think married life finally broke me. I never expected to face the things I faced in marriage, the sorts of deep challenges and disappointments and fears and isolation that went beyond anything I had ever imagined.
There were also other negative experiences and influences that eroded my other islands of personality. My vocational dreams collapsed. That was pretty huge. Enormously so. I still don’t know exactly what to do about that one. And it’s been a good twelve years. I alao had some bad experiences with churches that really drained me and in some ways repeated my experiences from high school (not with church, with relationships). And I stopped having friends. And I was radically questioning my faith too and giving up on that, to see if it made any darn difference. And that’s not an easy step to walk back from.
If you put all those together, that’s are most of what keeps a fella going and sane. Is it any wonder I got super erratic and depressed? What would you do? I think this is one area where my intelligence and my good upbringing helped again. Although I came apart, I did it so competently and with so little fuss and obvious impact on my behavior that most people couldn’t tell it was happening. Or really anyone. I was too good at keeping things together. I had a carefully crafted machine of functionality that knew how to operate my life independently of what I was thinking or feeling deep down, and I had just enough life left in me to let it carry me around and keep things together while I fell apart internally.
I don’t know if I inherited that capability from my dad or learned it from my mom. Both seem plausible, so maybe it’s a bit of both. We all have social and behavioral machines we build to help carry whatever it is that we are through the day of impositions and annoyances and disturbances and onerous labor. They’re like exoskeletons we build out of bits of ourselves and bits of the people who teach and train us and shape and inspire us. They help us do what some parts of our flesh would be too soft and reluctant and limp to do otherwise.
But at some point you do have to address the state of things within. I won’t pretend that I have all the answers, but the funny thing is that if you keep going, however slowly, however painfully, however uncertainly, you eventually get somewhere. And I had spontaneous and unexplained gifts of grace and strength. I did make some good decisions. And some things did get better. I’m still a pretty messed up sort of person, and I don’t have the same confidence that I had at one point in my life. But I’ve also been through a lot and haven’t given up, and just knowing that, knowing that I do actually have some resilience and some ability to improve, and so do my circumstance, is encouraging. People don’t survive on happiness, they survive on hope and purpose. And I’m not all out of those yet.
Making Nobody Happy 