Why I am such a dick?
What follows is an exhortation, I promise.
More specifically, why am I such a dick about shyness, softness of voice, introversion? I don't think it's just 'I hate whom I've been,' though that's certainly part of it (I mean, you've read this blog, right?). And it's not just bound up in the self-esteem problems of friends and girlfriends, starting with my best (non-brother) friend in high school, in retrospect a typical somewhat depressed teenager who really, really wanted to get out of her suffocating life (the difficulties of which I never fully acknowledged, never wanted to I guess), whose complaints and entreaties eventually wore on me and wore me out. Or I would like to believe that this is a somewhat considered stance. But then how do you know?
Well that's one of the critic's conundra, you presumably know, hereafter analogized: I dislike shyness, am irritated by what I take to be the conscious decision to remain inside oneself when the world calls; and I have a Theory about it and terms of structure in which to talk about this characteristic. And I can't know for certain whether the Theory is a way of justifying to myself an irrational dislike, or the dislike is confirmation (in some twisted way) of the Theory's correctness. i.e. I'm constantly disappointed by other people's decisions to turn away from confrontations, but I'm not sure I didn't at some point post a bulletin on the inside of my skull saying This Is A Think You Will Be Disappointed By, to make my own surliness more palatable to me by comparison.
The Theory maybe you know already, and it's desperate to rise to the level of Philosophy. It goes like this:
'Shy' isn't something you are, it's something you do, or a way of doing...like Love. At every moment you choose to act or not, to speak up or not, and 'I am shy' isn't an explanation for your choices, it's only a description of them. The moment you act out you don't 'overcome your shyness,' a phrase that credits the substance of supposed shyness too much. Rather, you simply act in a way other than shyly. It's a goddamn adverb, and its noun form is a goddamn mask, a feint!
Similarly with 'creative.' Similarly with 'good.' So many people are so desperate to believe that there's a good person inside people who act badly, and that purity of good intention will remedy the effects of bad action. But what this means is: I hope tomorrow is better than today, and more specifically it means 'I hope for this improvement notwithstanding the evidence suggesting tomorrow's gonna be well fucked.' In order to get to a non-fucked tomorrow, you have to change something. You can't change your feelings directly; only your actions. In many ways your feelings will follow, assuming you're in the fat part of the psychological Gaussian. (If you force yourself to smile and you're not freakily accustomed to it, you'll get a little boost of energy. Sometimes that's all you need. Absolutely not sustainable, I know, but it's a tiny example of feeling following function. Er, form. Hmm, didn't really figure that one out before typing.)
A woman in her mid-20's posted to Ask MetaFilter this week, inquiring as to how to convince someone in complicated circumstances that he should marry her and not someone else. My response was predictable: you can't. You can only make it worthwhile for him to make that decision on his own. And more debatably: if Boyfriend was gonna pull the trigger, he'd have done so by now. I mean that's not always true, fine, but it's a guiding principle, not a rule.
The big deal for me wasn't her question (which seemed straightforward). Rather, I was pissed off that she insisted that she didn't want to read anything that would deepen her level of despair, so she only wanted suggestions on how to remedy the situation. Answers of the form 'DTMFA' were not welcome. (He won't tell his parents about her, after a year. And so forth.)
Being told that bad news or blunt advice isn't welcome infuriates me. It's like running a company and ignoring any report that earnings are down, redirecting the complain email address to /dev/null, ridding the Board of realists...
...actually, it's like being George W. Bush. The President of the United States, the most powerful idiot on Earth, is practically the archetypal case of Treating A Choice Like A State. He's shy (metaphorically speaking).
We can perhaps define Love as 'confusing desire with necessity.' Or what's The Matrix all about? 'You can't see past a choice you don't understand.' That's the ethical definition of a category mistake. 'If only I'd been nicer to her she wouldn't have left.' 'If only I'd spent five more hours a day at the office, I might have gotten that promotion.' 'If only I show him fifty more ways that I love him so so so so so much, he'll love me back that way.' Thrice wrong.
'Love' is a slippery term and it justifies all manner of stupidities. It's a lexical catch-all, a way out through words, and its close cousin is the class of descriptions like 'shy' and 'good.' And 'evil.' As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, 'You can't think your way to right action, you have to act your way to right thinking.' George Bush of all people would know that - but then The Good Lord Himself is George's sponsor. Those of us without a direct line to the deity are advised to take the proverb seriously. Our state of being describes the progress and outcomes of our actions - our choices. To that extent, you can certainly be a 'shy person' - just like you can be a 'person in Georgia' or a 'person watching television.' Forgetting that the button next to Channel Up has the amazing power to switch the goddamn thing off. And back on if you wish for safety and comfort later, memories being what they are, death being what is, you being whom and how you choose.
