What Am I Like?
One day when I was 11 years old, my best friend mustered his courage and asked me flat out, “What am I like?”
I knew this was a faux pas. I told him what I would have wanted to hear. “You’re cool. Everybody likes you.”
Even though I knew he’d asked a forbidden question, I was secretly thrilled because it meant I could ask him back. “What am I like?” I said.
His answer was informed by the same self-absorption as his initial question. “How would I know?” he said.
It didn’t matter. I’m pretty sure the character assessment we get from a friend, when we’re foolish enough to ask for it, is mostly useless. As a condition of mutual affection, most of us probably require true allies to keep the complete view to themselves.
*
For many years, I delivered after-dinner remarks at the annual graduation ball for the school where I taught. It was a boarding school, complete with a classroom dress code and “Number 1” uniforms for more formal occasions. Some students asserted their independence by mistreating their official clothing. They poked thumb-holes in the sleeves of their sweaters, rolled the waists of their skirts, let their socks bunch around their ankles, and discarded the approved ensembles on the floors of their boarding house bedrooms.
The graduation ball was the evening on which students made their most conspicuous effort to embrace the pageantry of formal dress. After witnessing their daily contempt for required clothing, I was struck by their elaborate ballroom transformations. They embraced the elevated attire with an enthusiasm usually reserved for dress-up fundraisers like Hallowe’en. At grad, they wore tuxedos and patent leather shoes, gowns and glittering heels, corsages and boutonnieres.
“It’s like you’re an actor on the red carpet!” a girl told me years ago.
That’s exactly what you are, I wanted to say, but I kept my mouth shut.
The kids objected to the sameness of required school clothing, naturally, and championed the elevated self-expression of tuxedos and gowns. (The elevated self-expression of tuxedos?) Some of them had worn school uniforms for a dozen years, and almost all of them found irresistible the splendor of the adult world ahead of them. Hard to tell them the costume only feels like an answer.
*
Medical circumstances forced me to take a leave from February through June of 2012. At the end of January, during my final class with one of my grade 12 sets, a student asked if I would attend their big night.
“Can’t keep me away from a dress-up party,” I said.
“Will you still give the speech?”
“Absolutely.”
The students wished me well on their way out of the classroom.
One boy lagged behind, a kid with a lopsided smile and expressive green eyes. He grinned and asked, “The speech . . . is it gonna be about me?”
It was an appealing joke for a certain kind of personality—self-deprecation in the form of mock-arrogance. I heard it every year in the same context, so I provided my standard answer. “Yes, of course. I can’t think of anything more fascinating.”
“Okay, then!” the boy said, smiling at his own presumption.
The same thing played out in another senior class. When the speech subject came up, one of the girls made a double thumb-stab toward herself.
“Absolutely,” I said. “I should have thought of it sooner.”
She tilted her head back to release a peal of laughter.
These students were joking, but the exchanges concealed—or displayed—a deeper plea.
Young people, in particular, hunger to understand the impression they make in the world. Both human nature and social media want to measure influence. The vast majority of students would be mortified to listen to a speech about themselves, but the idea promises at least a partial answer to an ages-old existential question. What am I like?
*
It’s natural to be curious about how our personalities resonate in the world. We want to know if the self we attempt to display is the one other people see. Do they notice our talent? Do they see us as moral and/or principled? Likable? Are we attractive, in their eyes, and if so, in which way, precisely—cute, beautiful, interesting, handsome, hot? Do they see our substance? Do we strike them as intelligent? Do they think we’re competent or creative, funny or authentic or down-to-earth, or a-little-weird-in-a-good-way?
These questions don’t leave us in childhood or adolescence. In my 20s, I was mentored by a fellow 15 years older than me. He insisted he did not care what others thought of him. I believed he was guided by a vision of integrity, and I wanted the same detachment for myself.
Generous assessments of my ability and personality sometimes came my way, but the gossip mill also delivered harsh judgements of my failures as a teacher and human being. These last stung because I cared very much what others thought of me. I wanted to be like the man who was informally life-coaching me. I wanted to not care!
I was surprised, then, when my 40-something tough-guy mentor turned to me one day and asked, “So what are people saying about me?”
*
Most families I knew growing up owned a cassette tape recorder. In those days, people often reacted with discomfort to the sound of their recorded voices. “That’s not me!” they’d say. “Is that me? I hate my voice!”
It was like they were hearing, for the first time, a well-known secret about themselves.
In the digital age, people grow up knowing intimately what they sound like and what they look like. Mostly.
We possess as many photos, videos, and audio clips of ourselves as we have the self-absorption to acquire. Even with all this information, we’re not 100% confident about what we look like. We behold ourselves in the mirror every day, but our eyes filter the data with prejudice both for and against.
I am sometimes shocked when a photo reveals the thousand lines on my face. I don’t wear my glasses when I shave, and my eyes have deteriorated enough to miss the finer etchings in the skin of time, stress, sunshine, laughter, insomnia, and fear.
I’ve seen people of all ages glance slyly at the surface of a plate glass window, as if they hope to surprise their own reflection and see their real image—the one everyone else sees.
*
It’s crazy that we don’t know what we’re like. No one else gets access to our entire story—every external experience, every internal notion, every shadow of emotion in the heart. Every daydream and nightmare. As individuals, we know the lies we tell and the secrets we keep. We live invisible imaginative lives. We monitor the fulfillment or failure of every earnest resolution. We know if the credit we receive is more than we deserve, or less than is just. We catalogue our anonymous acts of kindness and our dark-hearted fantasies of revenge. We understand where our actions spring from true generosity and where they are performative and therefore corrupt in spirit.
Despite romantic rhetoric to the contrary, no one wants to be completely known. We all hide unacceptable thoughts. A friend of mine once confessed relief that his mother maintained her composure during her painful death from cancer. He did not want her memory sullied by twisted opioid hallucinations or streams of guttered language—but he recognized the potential for his mom to shatter, under duress of physical pain, her traditional propriety.
To quell the fears of students troubled by their own weird thoughts, I once confessed in class to a personal habit of long standing. Whenever I pass people near a protective railing, or close to the edge of a precipice, I slip my hands into my pockets and steer a wide course. It’s a precaution to counter the voice that whispers, “Go ahead . . . push!” I don’t think I would ever send another person over the edge, so to speak, but I’m distrustful enough of even my own good intentions not to take the risk.
The complete self, the one made up of all our private thoughts and off-camera actions, is not our self-in-the-world. In fact, we take part daily in a broad social conspiracy to disguise and deny our darkest impulses. This is nowhere more obvious than in the self-conscious construction of our social-media personas. The self we show the world is an edited version of our complete self, an anthology of selected personality traits, a greatest hits album of successful attitudes, habits, and beliefs. We would all do well to honor the Hollywood admonition not to believe our own press.
The fortunate and the foolish alike, I sometimes think, wear their gowns and tuxedos into the world as if those are the only clothes they own.
*
If we don’t know what we’re like, it’s partly because it’s human nature to mishandle the evidence.
In her 30s, my mother assumed the across-the-street neighbors, and the down-the-block family, exceeded her own little clan. Their houses were neater, their yard better-trimmed, their relationships more loving or more honest or more . . . successful. Across the decades, of course, she learned that their encounters with tragedy, failure, and disintegration matched or surpassed ours.
As a classroom teacher, I saw a similar pattern in the way students evaluated the lives of their peers. I called it “Three Things.” The kids would focus on a limited number of conspicuous facts about one of their classmates. “Facts” might be a stretch. More like impressions, projections, and assumptions. They would use this limited data to imagine for the other person an entire life. Student A is good looking, earns top marks where I struggle, and stands out on the basketball team. (Or plays in a band, or starred in the play. Whatever.)
No question Student A was capable. But I don’t need to explain to any adult, particularly former high school stars, how inadequate are the fabrications of gossip, fear, envy, and imagination. I taught hundreds of versions of Student A. On the whole, they were as troubled as anyone else by the full range of human anxiety, sorrow, secrecy, self-loathing, and fear. The judgement of others can be a merciless burden, even when it runs in your favor.
*
A second aspect of “Three Facts” applied to the perceiver. Just as we might base our positive impressions of another person on a limited number of “facts,” so too do we base negative conceptions of ourselves on a finite set of perceptions.
Human beings almost universally suffer from negativity bias—an evolutionary tendency to exaggerate threats and amplify fears. This forces us, at no time more powerfully than when we’re subject to the hormonal infowars of adolescence, to use the “Three Facts” about ourselves to construct a towering sense of inadequacy, real or relative.
In short, we make positive assumptions about others and negative ones about ourselves. We assess the pageantry of friends, colleagues, and associates against our personal masquerades.
*
“Asking ‘What am I like?’ is a vital impulse,” I told the students on the evening of their graduation ball. “More than 2500 years ago, the simple commandment, ‘Know Thyself’ was recorded in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi as the aggregate wisdom of the Seven Sages. But we don’t acquire genuine self-knowledge with self-serving questions, or by pressuring our friends, or by reviewing digital archives of self-conscious behaviour.”
I used evidence from the school year to highlight qualities of loyalty, commitment, courage, and teamwork in their individual and collective actions. I told them what they wanted to believe about themselves. What I wanted to be true of them and of me. What their parents hoped for them. In the suspended reality of the occasion, this was expected. I was probably more sentimental than I had been in the past. Recent studies in mortality had filled me with sympathy for the fragile beauty of human striving.
If I could revisit that evening, I’d add this: You’re like everyone else—you’re “the human heart in conflict with itself,” as William Faulkner had it. You’re the classroom uniform crumpled on the floor of your room. You’re the glitter and pomp of your brocade gown and the sequins flashing on your vest. You’re all of it, all at once, and that’s why life can feel like such a mess.
You don’t arrive at the answer to what you’re like so much as you keep living the question. There’s no final destination for self-awareness. You’re like everyone else—a hot mess of contradictions: kindness and cruelty, love and resentment, generosity and parsimony, acceptance and judgment, appetite and anxiety and cynicism and hope, fight and flight and ambition and terror.
I remember watching the students move through the ballroom for the remainder of that Friday evening—dancing, visiting, laughing. The event took place in mid-May, but School would not finish for another month.
On Tuesday morning, the kids would drag themselves into class wearing wrinkled polo shirts, grey slacks, and pleated skirts from the classroom collection. The first day following the grad ball, the grade 12s always seemed to wear on their faces the stunned expressions of people who had just awakened from an intense dream. The clock had struck midnight, and the Cinderellas and Prince Charmings now found themselves reckoning with the pedestrian world of essays and equations, post-party rumours and raised eyebrows.
Life is both pageant and masquerade, and sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s putting on a show and who’s wearing a mask. Certainly me. Probably you.
