character

self-authorship

Mary Cassatt, Little Girl in a Blue Armchair, 1878

Last year, I went to a New Year’s Eve party where the host asked each of us to pick an adjective to describe what we wanted our 2024 to be. The word that came to my mind was “unapologetic.” I wanted to do things and not care what people thought of me. I almost forgot about my word, but in looking back on the year, I can confidently say that I’ve fulfilled this intention.

Even taking acting classes has been, unexpectedly, a process of learning how to be more myself. Many people think of acting as becoming a different character, but it’s really not. The best acting is not acting. The best actors are intimately attuned to their experience of the world. As the great acting teacher Sanford Meisner said, “how we act is the measure of our true character” and “acting is the ability to behave absolutely truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”

Lately, I’ve noticed that I’m particular about who I share myself with and how much energy I’ll expend in a given social situation. (Is this the definition of an introvert?) A friend and I went to a “Drink and Draft” event in the East Village, and toward the end, we were asked to talk to the people next to us. On her side was an older man who worked in finance, and upon becoming an empty nester, found himself lacking in hobbies. He perked up when he heard I was working on a book and asked, “What’s it about?” I felt an immense and bewildering dread at this question, anticipating a barrage of further questions. How long have you been writing? Where are you in the process? Have you always wanted to write? So I responded, “Fiction,” and announced I had to go home. My terseness didn’t go unnoticed, and later, I kept turning the interaction around in my mind. AITA? Should I have been nicer? I was tired after a long day of work and couldn’t summon the enthusiasm to be interviewed by a stranger who was dabbling in writing. My attention would’ve been forced.

When I think about what it means to “have character” it’s not just about having a moral backbone, it’s about aligning your actions with your intentions. I love how Angela Duckworth talked about character on the now-retired podcast No Stupid Questions:

The idea of character is to not think of anything as a one shot thing. It’s to think of yourself as somebody who is showing up again and again in a similar situation. It’s actually a trick that people use for self-control.

I could feign interest in a person in the name of politeness and endure ten, fifteen minutes of a conversation I don’t want to have, but is that how I’d want to show up in a similar situation tomorrow and the day after and the day after that? I’d rather let my genuine interest and energy guide my attention. The same principle applies to habit formation. If your goal is to be healthier, allowing yourself to have chocolate fudge cake because it’s been a stressful day means you’re allowing yourself to have chocolate fudge cake every time you feel stressed. That would defeat your purpose of becoming healthier.

In adolescence, we develop a psychological makeup shaped by cultural norms and expectations, which is what Robert Kegan calls the “socialized mind,” the third order of consciousness in his theory of adult development. This is when parents feel like their job is done because their kids have gone from acting like selfish brats to becoming responsible adults. About 35% of adults undergo a further transformation later, which is the shift from the socialized mind of adolescence and early adulthood to the “self-authoring mind.” This is where people develop “an inner seat of judgement” to evaluate external expectations. Instead of letting their culture dictate their beliefs, they author their own identity, their own set of beliefs, and develop personal authority.

You go through life doing what’s expected of you—first in school, then in your first job, your first serious relationship—until one day you wake up and ask, “Do I really have to do this?” Do I have to work at this company? Do I have to hang out with this person? Do I have to go to this party? And the answer is no. We are freer than we give ourselves permission to believe.

I never questioned whether I would have kids until I moved in with someone for whom it was a question. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to think I wanted them, I had to know why. I had to hold that desire to the light and ask if it was really mine. Because having kids wasn’t inevitable despite what my social conditioning would have me believe. Shortly after that, everything else underwent the same scrutiny. Work. Career. Friendships. It’s not enough to know what I want. I have to know why I want it. I have to want it for reasons that are undeniably my own.

So why do we spend so much of our limited time doing things we don’t actually want to do? I think the problem isn’t that we don’t know what we want. It’s that pursuing the things we want necessitates giving up on what we think we should want, thereby renouncing an identity that made us feel safe for 20+ years, and it’s hard not to view that relinquishing as a threat to our sense of belonging, rather than an evolution toward a higher purpose. Kegan observes that the departure from the socialized mind toward the self-authoring mind is fraught with “terror and anticipated loss.”

On a related note, this has been the longest I’ve gone without posting on this Substack, and it was entirely unplanned. I got very busy with work and the book I was supposed to finish in September. Faced with the choice between writing the book and my Substack, I found myself choosing the book over and over. We should always go where our energy pulls us and make no apologies about it.

Thank you for reading. See you in the new year.

E