Reading · Whispers of Her Soul

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There are more than eight billion people alive and I have spent an unreasonable amount of time wondering whether I am doing being a person correctly.

Too sensitive. Too serious. Too quiet in some rooms and far too talkative in others. Not confident enough. Not disciplined enough. There has always been something available for review.

It is a remarkable amount of quality control for the only version of me that exists.

There are things about myself I would change tomorrow if change were that obedient. I would like to be less impatient. I would like to stop replaying the tone of a two-word message long enough to construct an entire explanation for why somebody has suddenly changed their mind about me.

There is work to do.

But lately I have been thinking about the person underneath all that work.

This face. This mind. This temperament. The memories that shaped it, the fears that still interrupt it, the jokes I find funny, the people I love and the opinions I may strongly deny ever having held ten years from now.

There will not be another one.

I find that astonishing because I have spent so much of my life inspecting myself as though another model might become available if I complained loudly enough.

Imagine being given the only copy of something that will ever exist and immediately taking out a red pen.

The nose could be better. The body could be better. The personality could be less complicated. The confidence could use work.

Human beings are very efficient critics of extremely limited editions.

For years I thought self-love meant reaching a point where I genuinely liked everything about myself.

This seemed ambitious.

There are people I love enormously whose habits I would happily submit for immediate revision. I know which story they have told fourteen times. I know who leaves cupboard doors open as though somebody else has been employed specifically to close them.

None of this has prevented love.

Apparently I have always understood that a person can be irritating and precious at the same time.

I just forgot to extend the principle to myself.

I can know I am impatient without deciding impatience is the most important thing about me. I can regret something I said without treating one bad hour as a complete biography. I can dislike parts of myself and remain fond of the whole arrangement.

Why would I be the only person required to be flawless before affection becomes reasonable?

There is another part of self-knowledge I find much more interesting.

We are encouraged to know our weaknesses. Know your flaws. Know your patterns. Know where you fall short. Be self-aware.

Fine.

But why are we taught that knowing our flaws is self-awareness, while knowing our goodness is arrogance?

I can say I am impatient and nobody objects. I can admit that I have been insecure, stubborn or wrong and it sounds admirably honest.

But say, I am kind. I am intelligent. I have loved people well.

Suddenly the sentence needs an apology attached to it.

I still have lots to learn. I am not perfect. I don’t mean to sound full of myself.

As though a truthful account of yourself is only respectable when it is unflattering.

There are things I am glad exist in me. Things I have done that I am proud of. Times I could have been cruel and wasn’t.

It just belongs in the file.

A person who only knows what is wrong with themselves does not necessarily know themselves well.

They may simply know the prosecution’s case.

I wonder how many of us have mistaken self-criticism for depth because it sounds more sophisticated than liking ourselves.

Ask someone what they need to work on and they can speak for twenty minutes. Ask what they genuinely admire about themselves and suddenly the vocabulary disappears.

Once I started thinking about that, comparison became slightly more ridiculous.

Someone is prettier. Someone is smarter. Someone moves through the world with an ease I have sometimes wished I possessed.

There are eight billion people available for comparison. If you are determined to lose, the world has provided an excellent selection.

I have envied people whose lives I would not actually want.

What I wanted was one piece of them.

Their confidence, perhaps. Their marriage. The ease they seemed to have with themselves.

Envy is very good at cropping photographs.

It removes the price. The history. Everything that would make the comparison inconvenient.

Sometimes we make the contest even less fair. We take another person’s best quality and place it beside the thing we dislike most about ourselves. Their ease against our self-consciousness. Their beauty against the feature we have inspected in bad lighting for twenty years.

There is no final adjustment after which the world agrees I have become the correct amount of everything.

But even if I could collect every quality I have envied in somebody else, I would have to ask what exactly I was building.

At what point would the improved version stop being me?

I had spent too much time trying to become someone who looked right from the outside.

I forgot I was the one who had to live inside me.

There is a difference between growing and editing yourself out.

Because there are things about me that are not particularly impressive but are unmistakably mine.

I can become fascinated by a subject nobody around me cares about and lose hours to it. One sentence in a book can follow me for years after I have forgotten almost everything else on the page.

And I like that.

We seem to need everything about ourselves to be useful somehow.

Sensitivity has to become empathy. Stubbornness has to become perseverance. An odd interest has to turn into something useful.

Sometimes I would rather let a thing just be mine.

Some things really do need work. Sometimes what I call “just how I am” is actually annoying, including to me.

But contempt is not the price of change.

If I hurt somebody, I should apologise. One mistake does not have to mean there is something wrong with all of me.

You can correct something without hating its owner.

I want to become better without becoming an improved stranger.

And then there is the question I have asked in a hundred different forms without noticing what a strange question it is.

Am I good enough?

Good enough to be loved. Good enough to be chosen. Good enough to feel at ease in my own life.

Enough for what?

There is always an invisible examiner inside that word.

I am here.

I am already the person living this life. I do not have to earn my way into it.

That has changed the way I think about all the versions of myself that came before.

Other people enter somewhere in the middle.

My parents knew a version of me nobody I meet now will ever know. Old friends remember interests I have forgotten and opinions I hope they have the decency never to repeat. People I meet years from now may know a person nobody from my past could have predicted.

I am the only person who will meet every version of me.

I used to look back at some of those versions with embarrassment.

Now I think there is something unfair about judging an earlier self with information I did not have then.

Of course I know better now.

I got to read the next chapters.

That earlier version of me did not.

There are moments in which I would reach through time and strongly recommend that I stop talking.

But every version of me was meeting life for the first time.

So is this one.

There was no rehearsal in which I learned how to be this age. There will be none for sixty or eighty either.

I will keep becoming somebody I have never been before.

That is beginning to interest me more than whether I finally approve of myself.

For years I spent a lot of energy wondering whether other people enjoyed being around me.

It took me much longer to ask whether I enjoyed being around myself.

I do.

Not constantly. I imagine nobody is delightful twenty-four hours a day, including to themselves.

But I like the way my mind becomes interested. I like the things I notice. I like that I can change my mind when something convinces me, and that there are subjects capable of making me forget the time and jokes capable of ruining any attempt I make to remain serious.

It feels almost embarrassing to write that.

Why should it be easier to confess that I dislike myself than to admit that there are things about being me I enjoy?

A life does not have to look impressive from the outside to feel wonderful from inside it.

We are so accustomed to evaluating lives that we forget they are also meant to be experienced.

The world does not only happen around me.

It happens through me.

Nobody else hears a song through exactly my memories. Nobody else loves the people I love from exactly where I stand. Nobody else sees the world through precisely this history.

There is not another me in this world, and I am the only person who will ever know what being me felt like.

There is something a little lonely about that too.

Even the people who love me most can never completely know what it feels like to be me.

Other people will know me for parts of my life.

I am the one who has to be here for all of it.

That is not superiority.

It is intimacy.

I spent years trying to form the correct opinion of myself. Confident but not arrogant. Accepting but not complacent. Self-aware enough to notice every flaw before anybody else could.

Another performance review.

Having the correct opinion of myself was never the point.

Self-love is not a verdict.

There is not another me in this world.

I am here to have the experience of it.

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