Self-Respect
Motherhood has propelled my thinking around such things as self-respect, self-worth, self-esteem. Joan Didion propels my thinking around everything. She shifts my thoughts, provokes new ones, pulls out and reinforces old thoughts and expansive ways of thinking that have been buried and lost somewhere beneath the noise of… well, life.
This is the first, but I doubt the last, time I write about Joan Didion, who for the past half-century has been dissecting the complexities of cultural chaos with equal parts elegant anxiety and moral imagination. My first taste of her work was the essay ‘On Self Respect’ from her 1968 anthology Slouching Towards Bethlehem: a meditation on what it means to live well in your own soul. It feels even more important to internalise this now that I am a mother as the tides of opinion and judgement are so much more frequent, I need to know that I am anchored within myself and trust I won’t be seaweeded and pulled in other people’s ebbs or flows.
No need for me to do much more than pick some of my favourite excerpts and quote her directly:
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Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.
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Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts.
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Self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.
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To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out — since our self-image is untenable — their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meting the next demand made upon us. It is the phenomenon sometimes called ‘alienation from self.’ In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves — there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
