comparison

accepting who i am and who i'm not

Giovanni Boldini, Model and mannequin, 1873

For most of my life, I aspired to be more like other people. So I stretched myself like Play-Doh to fit their particular molds. I’m not someone who likes to go out and party hard. There was a brief period in college and shortly after when I enjoyed that kind of lifestyle, but now I would much rather hit a chill bar and go home at a reasonable hour than stay out late. Sleep has become more precious to me, and I prefer intimate conversations to dancing with a hundred sweaty people.

A part of me wishes I could still be the girl I was at 22, the girl I occasionally get a glimpse of on Instagram and Tiktok who’s still out there partying until four a.m.—because it’s fun and cool and glamorous.

I think we all carry a persona we wish we were but know we’re not. It might be a persona we’ve shed but still cling to or it might be one we never were and never will be. Typically, these are the people we envy. I’m truly happy with who I am, but I do envy a certain type of person who can party hard and look good doing it. And it’s a tender kind of envy because I was once that person, and for a while, I tried to hold on to that part of me that’s now gone. 

We carry this insecurity about the person we’re not into our relationships. There was a time I was afraid my boyfriend would leave me for someone fun and cool and glamorous. So I bought a bunch of “going out” clothes, and over the course of three months, I got dressed and went out almost every weekend. It was fun, and I looked great, but it didn’t feel like me. It felt like me trying to relive old memories. But I needed to do it in order to fully accept the new person I’d become.

I’m much better now at accepting who I am and who I’m not. But I still find it hard to show my truest self to other people. I think about Frances from Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends. She thinks highly of herself. She’s smart, capable, ambitious, and wants to get published. But she hides her ambitions and insecurities because she’s afraid of rejection. This is the first image we get of her: 

Melissa took our photograph outside, with Bobbi smoking and me self-consciously holding my left wrist in my right hand, as if I was afraid the wrist was going to get away from me.

Holding your wrist is a low status posture. She’s restraining herself because she doesn’t want to appear as she actually is. There’s a disconnect between the way she carries herself in public and what she secretly thinks about herself. 

I find Frances very relatable. I think it’s rare for your public persona to completely match your internal self view. We’re constantly trying to mold ourselves to be more palatable to others. We bend ourselves toward the mean in order to appear more “normal” than we actually are. As a result, we end up hiding the most interesting parts of ourselves. 

One of my flaws as a writer is that my protagonist is never as fully developed as my side characters. The feedback I’ve gotten is that my side characters are more interesting and likable because they have strong personalities whereas my main character’s personality is harder to grasp. I think this is because, as a main character myself, I have a tendency to do exactly what Frances does: to suppress the weirdest parts of me in order to appease others and avoid getting judged and rejected.

Despite having a strong sense of her own intellect and abilities, Frances is constantly comparing herself to others and judging herself less favorably, which leads her to assume she has very little power over them. One way to understand the apparent contradiction in her character is through anaclitic vs. introjective personalities. From this paper: 

Individuals with anaclitic psychopathologies tend to be plagued by feelings of helplessness and weakness, and they tend to have fears of being abandoned; they generally have a depleted sense of self. Individuals with introjective psychopathologies tend to be plagued by feelings of guilt, self-criticism, and inadequacy; they generally have a distorted sense of self.

I would say Frances has an anaclitic personality. On her own, she’s self-assured and confident, but her sense of self is depleted when she’s with other people because she’s comparing herself to them and finding them more interesting/accomplished/attractive, and therefore, capable of hurting her. This causes her to adopt a mask of indifference around others.

You have a real coolness about you, he said to me. Doesn’t she? Melissa nodded but not enthusiastically. My coolness, if I had any, had never moved her. Thanks, I said. And you can take a compliment, that’s good, he said. A lot of people will try to run themselves down, you’ve got the right attitude. Yes, I’m quite the compliment-taker, I said. At this point I could see him try to exchange a look with Melissa, who remained disinterested. 

Clearly, Frances’ coolness isn’t helping her connect with Melissa. It’s useful to examine the masks we wear around others. Am I adopting a posture of low status because I’m hiding my ambitions and dreams, afraid people will scorn them? Or am I adopting a posture of high status because I’m hiding my deepest fears and insecurities? Or both, like Frances?

We naturally play high or low status as a defense. Maybe we’ve been hurt in the past. One time, I revealed to a coworker that I was working on a fantasy novel, and her first reaction was “Ooh, are you going to be the next George R. R. Martin?” Her tone was mocking, and I immediately regretted sharing with her. Since then, I’ve been selective about sharing the “weirdest” parts of me. And I think that’s O.K. You can’t be your full self with everyone. But I do know that if I want to connect more deeply with someone, the way to do it isn’t to appear more “normal” but to simply be more of myself.