Wait, I'm New Here; Do These Street Lights Make My Self-Respect Look Like A Joke?
“Let me know
do I still got time to grow?
Things ain’t always set in stone
that be known, let me know [...]
Seems like street lights, glowing, happen to be
just like moments, passing, in front of me.
So I hopped in the cab, and I paid my fare;
see, I know my destination, but I’m just not there.”
Lyrics from “Street Lights” by extraordinarily talented musician and notoriously troubled human Ye, (aka Kanye West), from his 2008 album 808s and Heartbreak. Can be used in conjunction with the following.
“I did not become someone different
that I did not want to be. [...]
No matter how far wrong you’ve gone,
you can always turn around.”
Lyrics from musical poet and haunted human Gil Scott-Heron, in the song “I’m New Here” from the 2010 album of the same name, which he described himself as a participant in, stating “All the dreams you show up in are not your own.” (Itself a quote more than worthy of remembrance.) When put together with the previous quote from Ye, can become something of a call-and-response lullaby for those nights when you have to sleep in a bed of your own making.
“Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara [in Gone With the Wind, 1939], is something people with courage can do without.
To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. ... To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: ‘I hate careless people,’ she told Nick Carraway. ‘It takes two to make an accident.’
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. [...] Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
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. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon [Charles George Gordon, 1833 – 1885, British Army General] put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. [...]
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 notions 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. [...] 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 meeting the next demand made upon us.
It is the phenomenon sometimes called ‘alienation from self.’ In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the phone, 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—their 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.”
From On Self-Respect, by Joan Didion, from her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968. For when you need strength to push against the walls that are falling in on you.
“You're feeling nervous, aren't you, boy?
With your quiet voice and impeccable style;
don't ever let them steal your joy,
and your gentle ways, to keep 'em from running wild.
They can kick dirt in your face,
dress you down, and tell you that your place
is in the middle, when they hate the way you shine.
I see you tugging on your shirt,
trying to hide inside of it and hide how much it hurts. [...]
You get discouraged, don't you, girl?
It's your brother's world for a while longer;
you gotta dance with the devil on a river
to beat the stream.
Call it living the dream, call it kicking the ladder.
They come to kick dirt in your face,
to call you weak and then displace you
after carrying your baby on your back across the desert.
I saw your eyes behind your hair,
and you're looking tired, but you don't look scared.
Let 'em laugh while they can.
Let 'em spin, let 'em scatter in the wind.
I have been to the movies, I've seen how it ends;
And the joke's on them.”
Lyrics from “The Joke,” by Brandi Carlile, from her 2017 album By The Way, I Forgive You. For when you need to pick up your downtrodden heart with a soaring anthem.
