How to Be True to Yourself

“Don’t become one of them! Do everything in your power to refuse trends and patterns, and take in more randomness, last chances, risks, strange days and your wild ways. Go through more hells and be swallowed whole by heartache. The line you never recover from. They will tell you time is the cure, but no one lives forever. Carry some pains and memories to your grave. Don’t hide from it! Don’t avoid it! Stand right in its path and let love destroy you. It’s the only way. Reach the end of it all, the very bottom, the deepest, darkest corner of yourself. Don’t become one of them. You must not settle, and if whoever or whatever you’re chasing isn’t making your whole heart sing, it’s not meant for you. And it never will be. I hope you get everything you deserve. Everything. The good and the bad. One day you’ll realise something: your heart is not the home for the weak. It’s not a home at all. It’s the world most of us only dream of seeing. And most people only dream. Don’t become one of them!” – this is what I was writing in July 2018. And over this slow summer, I have been revisiting old journals I’ve kept for the past twenty-five years or so. In an attempt at introspection, I felt I needed to dig deeper into this topic, but from a different perspective.

Everywhere someone is trying to sell you a new life. Leave the job! Move abroad, wake before dawn, drop the drinking, eat protein, use peptides! It works as a pitch because we half believe it ourselves. Yet, I believe the whole narrative rests on a misunderstanding about what we are really chasing. To be honest, almost no one I know wants to actually become someone else. People want something much harder to admit… to be the very thing they already are. So the first step is a strange one: you have to turn the offer down. And I have often asked myself under what conditions is real change possible? If it first requires that we work out what we actually want?

There’s a trend these days, an entire discourse built around the desire for change. We are told, and actually encouraged to believe, that this is the one thing everyone longs for: to change our habits, find a new line of work, go off and live somewhere else, and so on. Coaching and self-help flourish by handing out recipes for what we understand as beginning all over again. At the bottom the promise is deeply religious, religion in its capacity to offer passage from one condition to another (from sin to grace, from finitude to eternity), the promise of being born again.

The summons to change also answers to liberal ideology, to its picture of an autonomous, flexible individual obliged to reinvent himself without end. But is it even possible to change utterly, from top to bottom? And is that truly what we want?

To my mind, what we really wish for is not to become someone else but to be ourselves more intensely, not some largely illusory radical transformation of the self, but an acceptance and an affirmation of one’s own being. So for real change to occur, I think one has to begin by resisting these hollow injunctions to change, above all, one must not want to change.

What matters first is to understand what we are, to grasp what makes us the thing we are. This is the approach philosophy defends, to be more precise Spinoza’s, before anyone else’s.

And what I learnt from Spinoza about this self-understanding is that at the heart of his thought lies the “conatus”. Stoic in origin, the concept names the effort each thing makes (a stone, an animal, a human being) to persevere in its own being. This is the great thesis of the Ethics: we are defined by our appetite for life; as the philosopher writes, “Desire is the very essence of man.” We are never anything other than our desire, understood as that which inscribes and projects our will-to-live across time. From there, the task is to determine the best means of persevering in one’s being, to discern what yields joy, what increases our power to act.

For Spinoza this calls the work of reason into play: the highest joy, “beatitude”, is won in the measure that we come to understand the necessity of things, that we grasp our place within the vaster order of nature.

But Spinoza’s thought can be carried further in my opinion. I do believe certain ways of living diminish our force of existing, as when the conatus fastens onto the wrong objects: alcohol, say, or worse… drugs. At first there may be a sense of exhilaration. And yet one sometimes ends up realising that knocking back glass after glass of whisky, that destroying oneself, does nothing to enlarge one’s being.

To take the opposite case, in love the beloved can give a joy both powerful and lasting; for the one who loves, life and the world suddenly become more absorbing. Bref, the point is to detect what allows us to remain the same, only a little more powerfully, which sometimes means reorienting our desires.

I also think that understanding one’s desires better is also the ambition of psychoanalysis. Spinoza and psychoanalysis do meet on this, that what counts is to clarify one’s desire, to learn what makes it run. What is being woven inside me? What moves us? The aim of analysis is less to cure some malaise or symptom than to listen to the unconscious at work, so as to understand what is being played out in that malaise or symptom and what is seeking to express itself through it. Psychoanalysis thus holds that desire constitutes us and yet escapes us.

We never decide our desire; I am neither its cause nor its master. It is bound up with repressed mechanisms, with a personal history, with chance encounters. And yet, in analysis or in life, it is possible to locate one’s desire, to glimpse where it lies, where it “catches”. And one then becomes capable of relating to it, of saying “yes” or “no” to it.

Lacan, who read not only Freud but Spinoza closely, has that famous formula: “The only thing one can be guilty of is having given ground on one’s desire.”

And then I wonder what does that phrase mean, “giving ground (or not) on one’s desire”?

For Lacan the subject, the “I”, is always the subject of the unconscious; it is never the ego swollen with its narcissism and its little anecdotes, but rather that force stronger than our small self which makes us able to say — “her, I desire”, “that, I do not want”, and so on. If we fail to move in its direction, we betray ourselves, and this gives rise to a guilt that is always deadening.

To explain what “not giving ground on one’s desire” means, Lacan takes the example of Antigone: she has a fierce desire, to bury her brother Polynices, and she does not flinch before it; she will do anything to see it through, beginning with the transgression of the city’s laws. Here, holding to one’s desire carries a tragic dimension. But there can also be a comic version, which Lacan defines as the action of a little fellow who keeps falling in the mud and picks himself up every time. We may laugh at him; and yet he perseveres in his being, in his desire to walk, to press on.

Does this perseverance amount to an ethics? What are we to do with our desire then?

If one wanted to draw out a maxim, it would be this: be faithful to your desire. The Lacanian hero, or the Spinozist hero, is the one who holds firm, who follows the same direction again and again. We are at the very antipodes of self-help, with its perpetual preaching of letting go, of detachment, of remaking oneself too quickly. To be faithful to one’s desire is to cling to what one feels as an inner necessity. It isn’t easy! It demands strength of soul, tenacity, patience. But that strength exists, and it can be recognised in every domain of life.

It is the lover who refuses to give up the one he loves, though he goes from disappointment to disappointment, like Stendhal, ardently coveting Matilde Dembowski without ever reaching his end. It is the artist who never abdicates his vocation despite the failures he suffers, or the craftsman who cares less about selling his wares than about testing, endlessly, his power to make. It is the militant who has discovered the truth of a cause and fights for it without respite. In all these cases, the point is to find joy in the very movement of one’s activity, to bring some eminent possibility of life more fully into being. One does not scatter oneself; one persists along the path of whatever strengthens and enlarges one’s being. Sometimes what follows is a kind of happy liberation, a revelation of the self to itself. Sometimes not, but then one can at least tell oneself that one tried, and that this already made it worthwhile, because there is always more life in the attempt than in the outcome. Real change, then, is not becoming someone else; it is, in that constancy, in that fidelity to the desire that makes us be, the ceaseless effort to find oneself again.

And so I’ll leave you here, at the edge of whatever you were too frightened to walk into before, yours, into the deep end,

Tamara

Not a tip jar. A ledger for what you underlined in your mind.