Dear readers,
I have launched both an introduction and the first episode of You Can’t Tell Me S***, an audio extension of the blog where I look more closely at the advice and mantras handed to us by culture and why I tend to question them. The link to my channel is below, and will soon live in the navigation bar at the top of the page. I will also be posting here for each new episode with audio transcription so that you can follow by reading if you prefer.
This series is recorded without a script and through my earbud microphone.
Reintroduction for those who want it:
Episode 1: The Issued Self [+Audio Transcription]
You can’t tell me shit, because I have to see it for myself.
Welcome back.
So, I want you to consider the last time you were sitting with somebody, or expressing to somebody that you trusted, something in your life that was difficult, to say the least.
Usually, in this situation, we’re feeling pretty vulnerable and we’re looking for an outside perspective. And I’m willing to wager that, at least in a few of those circumstances, you’ve had somebody give you an extremely watered-down piece of advice that seems overly simplistic.
I might just be speaking for myself here, but again, I’m willing to wager.
And often, mantras become things that we pass on as part of our culture. Things like, “You do you,” and, “Their behavior isn’t about you,” or even simply, “You’re worrying too much about this. Life is short.”
And I understand, on the surface, that generally speaking, people are generally trying to help you. But I’ve also come to understand that, at least in some of the circumstances, the help is a response to the discomfort of somebody you care about being in relative distress.
And for me personally, that intensity of slowing me down is actually detrimental to my process of figuring out something that is stressful for me.
And so, anytime somebody’s presenting me with unsolicited advice—you know, me not asking for advice—or giving me a universal factoid of life, it honestly just kind of makes me want to exit the situation. And it doesn’t actually do anything to slow down the thought loops.
And part of that is why now I record things on the internet and write. It is an investigative approach to things that I think deserve a little bit more explanation than much of social culture really allows for.
And I’ll be quite honest: I haven’t met that many people that enjoy sitting down with me and picking things apart to this level. And that’s on me.
But for this series, I’m going to do the opposite, and I’m going to dig into the fallacies in some of these pieces of advice, and where I think sometimes we are limiting the amount of connection that we are capable of having with other people as a result.
And we’re going to start with “You do you,” or “Just be yourself.”
So, a creator that I follow on Instagram named Christian Van Linda—he is Hypervigilance—he explains a lot of theories about narcissism and consciousness on his account that I really enjoy listening to. And they tend to take this exact form. They’re very much thinking out loud, responding to prompts, and it’s generally unscripted.
And he doesn’t beat around the bush either.
But something that he brought up that made me think quite hard—harder than usual—is this idea that if you take an infant and you place them in a room with no stimulus, how does that consciousness begin to develop a personality, or behaviors, or patterns of their own?
And for the sake of the hypothetical here, they don’t.
Our behaviors, and the way that we speak, and the opinions that we form, are all variations of what is fed to us through exposure and life experience and socioeconomic status and the people that we are surrounded by in our developmental years.
And so each one of us is kind of an amalgamation of different stimuli. And to bring it back down to ground level, we are all products of what we were born into.
And for me personally, I think that’s why I have come to now speak more, is because the environment that I was born into and had so much authority over my development, I somehow decided very early on was not legitimate.
I had two parents that were both incredibly emotionally reactive and manipulative, and just genuinely not responsible for another human life. And I mean that harshness on purpose.
And that means that I had to assume authority over what I was going to think and how I was going to behave, to some degree, on my own.
That is, I think, psychologically impossible in totality. But I got just enough of that stubbornness trait that I have removed myself from most of those patterns. I can still observe some of them in myself, just enough to reflect on them.
But so much of my writing is: I want to understand where myself ends and the person across from me begins.
And so much of society is very, very much consumeristic. It’s: here’s this idea, and here’s why I think that you should buy into it, and this is the level of knowledge that I have on this subject, and I’m trying to convince you to think a similar way.
And more recently, since I’ve started generating my own content, I’m taking in a lot less—not entirely, because I don’t want to become an echo chamber—but I’m very interested now in how we are developing our senses of self from what we are consuming and taking in from other people, versus the opposite approach of: What do I already know about myself and my values and what I want my life to be, and how am I using that to influence what my surroundings are?
And so that brings me right back to that mantra.
“You do you” is only something that you can actually act on if you know exactly what “you” is.
And Carl Jung can probably tell you a few things about how difficult that can be, especially for those of us who were not adequately supported when our senses of self were developing as children.
And so, when you think back to that example that may have come up for you earlier, I want you to ask yourself: Did that advice actually help you?
For some of us, it might have worked just fine. But it is an example of taking what has become the synopsis of somebody else’s experience, or the experience of other people through time, and applying it to yourself, whether or not that was actually something that rang true for you.
And it kind of takes us back to another mantra, which is, “Don’t care what anybody else thinks.”
And this is where I get kind of ridiculous, is: Okay, if I’m not supposed to care what anybody else thinks, then why should I take your advice at face value?
And it kind of questions exactly the thing that I just mentioned, which is: Why are you so quick to tell me how I am supposed to think about this?
And generally, by the time I reach that point, I then realize I just kind of have the wrong audience right now.
And so that drives almost a reclusivity, where I take that back home and I say, “I can’t really bring this to another person right now.”
And thus begins the trip inside the self that is kind of the backbone of my work.
When a child is in an unsafe, unsupportive environment like I was, where else is there to go but inside?
And thankfully, I dare to say that I think I have a pretty strong concept of who I am because of that. I won’t necessarily say that I would prefer that scenario to happen for anybody else. For me, I think I just got incredibly lucky.
In my experience, I do tend to be a person that has a lot of concerns for how other people think of me, because how they think of me often dictates how they treat me. And as you can already assume, I haven’t necessarily had the people close to me treat me very well throughout a significant part of my life.
And despite that, I honestly tend to follow my own compulses anyway.
You can take this right back to the decision to live in a van—and an old van, at that.
I got profiled by the police a lot. If they saw me parked somewhere, I would have the neighbors call them on me, and sometimes they would ask me to move. Sometimes they were just checking to make sure that I was actually a safe individual.
And every single time that I answered a police knock at the door, I could kind of see them not necessarily get the image of the person they were expecting, and the whole interaction actually diffused in a way that I think I’m a bit privileged, being a young white female.
And I never encountered any issues beyond just the nuisance of having people judge the situation and call the police on me to begin with.
But I will march to my own drum, even though the consequences of that are me behaving in a way that isn’t necessarily socially acceptable, and kind of being penalized to near or far degrees as a result.
And so, you know, it raises the question: Does this advice to “just be ourselves”—is that cost-free?
In my experience, it absolutely hasn’t been.
I can find myself quite isolated because not only am I quite vocal sometimes, in ways that are very abrasive to other people, but I also am living in actual circumstances that isolate me from people that I would consider my peers.
I would love to be surrounded by people that are incredibly critical thinkers, and a lot of those people tend to be on more highly academic pathways than I have been able to access. And so there’s a major socioeconomic gap between me and the people that are more like-minded.
The difference for me has actually been cycling, which is also a very privileged sport. And the whole reason that I had access to it to begin with was because I made all the sacrifices that were required to do so—i.e., living in that damn van.
And even there, I’m still kind of standing on the edges because I don’t have the same background, or the same support system, or the same access to equipment and races and the ability to travel that most of the people around me are.
And this is my decision. All of this is absolutely the result of the decisions that I have made.
Also, I don’t feel like making other decisions was possible without absolutely denying myself the things that I wanted.
So chew on that for a second.
And so, with that all being said, I tend to be a person that doesn’t necessarily seek out the advice of other people, because usually I’m not looking to replicate their life.
I want to figure these things out for myself.
Hence is how we got the title for this podcast.
And that might actually be leading to me living my life a lot more slowly and reaching fewer goals. But for me personally, there is no other path.
And in any instance where somebody asks me for advice, as I have seldom experienced—as, in some other person’s words, having the life experience of a hundred-year-old woman—I tend to say something like this:
If ever you’re in a grocery store and you drop something on the ground, I want you to say out loud, “You dumb b****,” because that’s going to make you laugh, that’s going to make the person next to you laugh, and it’s going to kind of stop you in your tracks for a second.
As you can probably tell, I’m quite comfortable telling you how I think.
But I’m not comfortable at all telling you how you should think.
So I’m not going to start now.
