Another Gloss on Self-Respect
One of you asked me how to find it. Sort of.
Hi, sailor. First: Mermaid Café is arriving today rather than tomorrow because there’s this little fête called the United States Presidential Election, and I do not believe you want to hear about horse trinkets or silver cowboy boots on Election Day. (Or maybe you do. You subscribe to this newsletter, after all.)
Second: I originally planned a selection of four mini-essays on fashion — on shoplifting, why I hate putting on clothes, fashion and Substack, and self-respect — but the latter turned into a full-fledged monograph, and I felt the urge to temporarily shelve the other three and let this one bloom. Enjoy.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a little about self-respect in a Q+A, and a thoughtful, anonymous user asked me a follow-up question that I’d like to answer here:
Q: i asked the self respect question and read your answer. i appreciate it and it truly is helpful. but in a more primal sense, WHY should someone respect themself? (i have a semblance of an answer and innate feelings about it but i want to hear yours too) i also think the source of the value i see in myself lies in how useful i am to others. but if i’m not particularly special or helpful, why should someone seek my company? also, HOW do i honour and trust myself? is it a belief that i deserve something no matter how replete with vices i may be? is it merely an indifference to myself but the building of a familial sort of shell around me as i wade through the world to protect myself? i’m sorry i can’t express myself better but does this make sense
I think this totally makes sense. Not to wade too deep into anthropological fantasy, but imagining the Cro-Magnons wandering and wondering if they respect themselves is difficult. This is not to say that the question of “Why should someone respect themself?” is unimportant, but rather that self-respect was, at a certain point, simply a lesson in survival. The less we have to endure today — a killing frost, a hunt gone wrong — the more self-respect seems like less of an essential feature of our lives and more like a vestigial organ. But we should consider what it means to respect ourselves as a part of our modern survival.
I would call survival not merely the opposite of indifference but instead a partial host to it. Self-respect as a survival method — to survive both the horrors and blessings of everyday life, alike in their intensity — requires indifference and careful assessment of this intensity. We cannot be wholly indifferent to our fears, insecurities, and doubts; otherwise, we’d be living quite delusional lives. We also cannot be so fastidious over everything that blights us; otherwise, we’d get nothing done with our lives, which is another shape of delusion. You survive by finding careful balance.
The question of life value differs for everyone. In your case — How useful are we to others? Why should someone seek our company? — you seem to define life value by abnegation, contribution, do-goodism. These are worthy ideas, but they’re not the only ideas. You can easily find people who might see life value in producing art; seeking knowledge; child-rearing; travel. Rubricating principles isn’t necessarily a bad practice, but it can inhibit us from other modes of and perspectives on living. And yet these life values, too, can strike us so deeply hostile that it’s not that we cannot see living any other way, but rather that we don’t want to see living any other way.
So I will meet you where you are and treat your moral code as sacrosanct. Why should someone seek our company? I’ve spent weeks trying to come up with a legible answer. I can only say this: I don’t believe our relationships, fleeting or persistent, are as transactional as anyone thinks. Sure, you may tolerate a chucklehead at work if they’re a good team member. Maybe, on a night out, you entertain long conversations about postage stamps and shipping rates because you want to sleep with the Postage Stamp Guy. Or perhaps you realize you’re only friends with a colleague because you see them five times a week. How delicious would it be to think like that, pruning our connections down to their base social or economic merit, applying a child’s sense of cause and effect. If only it were so simple.
A few years ago, I took a train to visit some friends upstate. I’d never traveled alone before, and all of my impedimenta — my printed tickets, my supersized carry-on, my mohair sweater tied around my neck — revealed an obvious anxiety. I brushed off the station master’s instructions to sit inside and instead stood alone on the platform, fearing I’d miss the train if I could not see the exact nanosecond of its arrival. No Internet connection, no scrolling, my book trapped at the bottom of my bag; I stared into the woods behind the railroad track and counted the few bare leaves beginning to reemerge on those late winter branches. To the suspicious eye, I may have looked like I was running away from something.
Before I could finally tally those leaves, a microscopic woman, who must’ve been no younger than 70, sat beside me and began speaking at me. At, of course, being the operative word; it was a conversation I was to be a part of, whether I liked it or not. She spoke slowly, with a slight halt, as if on the witness stand. She asked if I was from here (yes), why I was leaving (just a weekend trip), and if I liked moonshine (not really). Her boyfriend, about 20 years her junior, ran a distillery in Northern Virginia; she would take the train upstate, and then he’d pick her up across state lines. They did this every few months. I asked how long they’d been together (two years), if she wanted to get married (no, she’d done that several times already), and if she liked moonshine (absolutely not). We yammered at each other about ‘70s wedding dresses and the rain and James Taylor for what seemed like hours. I hadn’t even noticed that the train was arriving around the bend. We were placed in separate cars; we wished each other warm weekends with good weather and no moonshine.
I think about that woman often, not only because I thought she was deviously cool, but because it revealed a question I previously assumed inconsiderable. I’ve spent my entire life being told I look intimidating at best and scary (god, that word) at worst. Fear, joy, grief, surprise — it all reads as chilly. What I am feeling is never written on my face; I am simply not the kind of person other people approach. I must’ve looked unnerving out on the platform, my pale face steely and searching, my dark hair turned black in the cold February sun. Why had this woman sought my company? What did she have to gain from it?
There’s the rub: when we seek people’s company, or other people seek ours, it is often merely born from the intrinsic desire to connect, feel, understand. This is not transactional. While offering our time and attention may seem expensive, we are not consciously measuring it — our yearning for compassion stretches into the infinite, and needs not be perfectly matched or magnified. We talk to the scary girl waiting for the train because we have something to say, because she could have something to say, because there is nothing else to do but count the leaves. Being the object of another person’s attention has scant to do with our self-respect and everything to do with their desire to connect. Over time, it can all be ruled by good social decorum or lost by poor manners, but that initial encounter is ruled solely by nerves and feelings. To engage with the world around us, like developing a sense of self-respect, is a lesson in survival.
Now, your other question: HOW do I honour and trust myself? (How, rather than why.) Your next question: Is it a belief that I deserve something no matter how replete with vices I may be? (So the “how” must be not in application or practice but a disenchantment with possibility). I am not particularly literate in theology, and if I had to calculate the total amount of vices I’m guilty of, I don’t think “replete” would be a strong enough word. Maybe “glutted.” It’s not that I’m a hedonist, free from the jaws of remorse or repentance. I think it’s more that I have a very fixed, cardinal faith in myself (can you tell I was raised Methodist?). Let it be known this faith is not necessarily confidence, or courage, or determination, which must not be conflated. This faith is the self-assured, perhaps delusional belief that when I or anyone else errs, we will learn and do better, whether now or later on down the line, and that our merit as human beings is not found in tidy appraisals of every transgression or courtesy we commit. Our merit is found in the cosmic arc of what we do and how we grow, not exclusively in what we’ve done or who we ought to be. We deserve something — honor and trust, namely — not because we are “replete with vices” but because that cosmic arc commands us to respect ourselves in order to bend toward completion.
This is not a particularly spruce answer, nor one that proffers any kind of “easy” application. But if somebody told me to distill everything into one sentence, I’d say: Self-respect is the only way to grow and survive. That’s it. You can move through life without respecting yourself, sure, but are you growing? Are you surviving? Or are you counting the leaves?
See you on Friday. ꩜