I read Steve Jobs' biography long back and I've forgotten most of what I read. One of the scenes I do remember is a job interview. A young guy shows up to be interviewed for a job, and he blows the interview, turning extremely anxious. Later, Steve finds him sitting in the lobby looking dejected, and when he walks up to him, the guy asks, "Can I just show you what I built?" Steve humors him and is astounded by the guy's innovation. What the guy built was to put a small magnifying glass if you long press any part of the screen. He wasn't just implementing features, he had vision about what would delight the user. And Steve hired him on the spot.1
The anecdote was meant to show that Steve had a knack for looking beyond the surface level and spotting real talent in people. Something that Apple seems to have regressed on since his death. But what caught my attention was this idea that the brilliant, innovative version of the programmer was somehow the "real" version of the guy, and the socially awkward anxious guy who failed the interview was just a shell inside which this real person was trapped.
This isn't a new idea. It popped up in my mind recently when I read "The Tavern and the Temple" by
where he talks about this alternation between two parts of himself: The part that navigates the social niceties of the world, which is pleasant and non-intense and harmonious, and the writer part that is intense, earnest, and passionate at the risk of being scary. He quotes comedian Dave Chappelle saying something similar, to Seinfeld: That people expect him to go on stage and put on a show for an hour, and they think it's impressive, but to him that is the real him and to be on-stage is the easiest thing in the world.This idea keeps turning up in all sorts of stories:
The civil man with a suppressed monster (Jekyll and Hyde, The Green Goblin),
The superhero with an alter-ego (Superman and Clark Kent, Aang and the Avatar state)
A misunderstood genius with social awkwardness (The terrible depiction of Ramanujan in The Man who knew infinity, A Beautiful Mind, The Imitation Game)
Artists who lived a double life (Chekhov said "Medicine is my wife and art is my mistress," Kafka worked as an insurance clerk and wrote like a madman at night, Murakami's stories are bizarre but his life is very normal to the point of being banal)
Individuals with esoteric mental disorders (James McAvoy in Split, the schizophrenic protagonist of Kaadhugal – a tamil book) and so on.
The way the story is always painted is... "Oh look at this unfortunate soul with so much potential that is trapped in a mortal coil that is too limiting for it."
Visakan's essay reminded me of a short story called Pulikkalaignan by Ashokamitran. (I translated it here, because the original is in Tamil. If you like “A hunger artist” by Kafka you might like this). It's about a poor, starving "tiger artist" who play-acts as a tiger. The meek man begging for a role is painfully obsequious – until he starts his performance. Once he starts his performance, he transforms into a tiger. An uncanny supernatural force enters the body of the bony man, and he spends the next five minutes as a literal tiger, stunning everyone into silence. Then, when the performance ends, the artist transforms back into his timid self. Writer Charu Nivedita said in this talk2 that Ashokamitran himself was a sort of Tiger Artist – utterly unassuming and plain in his ordinary life, a dutiful father, a satisfactory husband, an engaged mentor to other writers... but when he sat on the bench at Natesan Park and wrote every day, he became someone else. The real Ashokamitran. Which is kind of funny because Ashokamitran is a pseudonym – his real name was Jagadesan. So he literally had two selves.
Here we go again, the dichotomy between "the real self" and "the limiting self." Potential vs the barriers that hold back potential.
I can relate to this split. I'm able to express myself in writing and in one-on-one conversation in a way that's hard for me to do in a group setting. The idea that there's some sort of untapped potential that is the real deal, which needs just one breakthrough to be unleashed, is a very tempting one.
It's also total bullshit.
Yes, there is a part of me that is intense and spontaneous. There is also a part of me that is reserved, anxious, and careful. Both these parts are equally valid, equally real, and one sustains the other. There is a yin-yang, push-pull kind of relationship between these two parts which makes them feed off of each other. There is no way I can sustain the pace of uncontrolled intensity that I bring to my writing 24x7 – it's just a recipe for burnout, for sure – but also, my life is architected in a way where the suppressed self creates the pressure that the intense self releases. The intense self is the pressure valve for the reserved self. Alain De Botton has a (somewhat depressing) video on why so many people want to be writers: He says there's an intense need for connection but a rising loneliness because people either don't have the courage or the connections with whom they can express themselves, so they turn to writing. Which is somewhat true, except that it makes it look like this is a debilitating disease that infects people despite their will.
But what if it's a choice that those folks make out of their free will?
David Lynch once gave a bunch of students advice on why they must not fetishize the image of the suffering artist and should get help if their mental health is preventing them from creating. Yes, Van Gogh turned a lot of his suffering into art, he said, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't have been a happier and more productive artist if he hadn't been suffering – denying Van Gogh the help he needed in the name of advancing art is an injustice to the man and to his art. Yet, the same David Lynch also spoke in another interview about how he rejected therapy. He went to a doctor who proposed a course of medication for something (depression/anxiety, I'm not sure), and David Lynch asked, "Will this interfere with my creativity?" The doctor said that honestly, it might, and Lynch chose not to medicate himself.
In the same way, being aware that there are two – or more than two parts of yourself – and choosing to be okay with that knowledge without necessarily changing anything, is completely fine. The first option is to rue that you are a victim of a strange condition, and the second is to recognize that this is a situation with tradeoffs and choose to lean into it anyway. Yes, you might have a healthier social life (healthy by whose standards?) or find fulfillment in real social connection. Even then, if you choose to reject those for some other purpose that's important to you, who's to say that it's wrong?
And it's important to listen to these parts and not villainize them. Maybe right now, creative expression or working in isolation is important to you and though you hear the faint voice asking for social connection in the background, you recognize it's there but don't act on it. But if the scales tip at any point and that voice grows louder, you at least know that what’s important to you is changing.
There's a concept in psychology called Internal Family Systems which I don't know much about but which I'm interested in – which says something like this – that your mind is like a family of personalities, all of whom have different character quirks which clash and collide with each other and cause inner turmoil if you don't have a way of resolving them. A lot of this inner turmoil comes from not being able to sit with certain parts of yourself. Maybe there's a part of you that's angry or frustrated or sad, and you've been taught that these are invalid emotions to have. Or there's a vulnerable part of you that wants to open up to somebody and you're scared, because it feels so unfamiliar. Suppressing these parts plays out like a Shakespearean drama where the productive, put-together, organized part might be dominating saying "STFU you whiny piece-of-shit" and the hurt vulnerable part might be sulking in the corner, just biding its time before it begins to ask for what it wants again. But if you're able to bring all these parts together at a Thanksgiving dinner and let them all talk it out, listen to them, and at least sit with them for a while, things might shift, just a little. I don't know what I'm saying. This is a stream of thought that's run its course.
Coming back to victim complex vs choice, this is essentially the difference between Freud's school of thought and Alfred Adler's school of thought. Sigmund Freud essentially invented modern psychotherapy and his idea was something like "Every symptom that manifests in a patient has a cause. If he's a people-pleaser now, maybe he learned in his childhood that unless he pleases everyone around him, he's going to get hurt. So let's dig deep into his childhood and figure out what's going on." This is called the aetiological approach – going deeper and deeper into thought to figure out what's the root cause. This is fine and it gives you somewhere to start, but it's also addictive for a certain kind of personality (hello hello) to keep picking the scab and digging deeper and deeper into an endless abyss that has no bottom.
Adler was a contemporary of Freud who suggested a different approach to fix this. He said that symptoms don't matter and trauma is a myth (That's a triggering claim and there are a lot of people on Reddit trashing him for that). What he means is that, yes, there might be a cause that controls how you turned out to be this way, but at every point, there is also a desire that controls how you react to it now. This is called the teleological approach.3 Maybe your early social interactions taught you that it's dangerous to interact with groups – but because you hesitated to interact with groups, you have developed certain coping mechanisms in life. You get to complain about how anxiety-inducing groups are. You might get sympathy or special attention when you talk to your handful of friends about how interacting with groups makes you nervous. Because you told yourself the story that you find it hard to interact with groups, you found other ways to keep yourself entertained – you read books, you wrote, you played computer games, you listened to music, and you found depth in all of these pursuits. Now, that story and that world dominates your life. At this moment, even if there is a small chance that you are willing to engage with a group, you won't just be fighting the anxiety of interacting with a group, you'll also be weighing the costs and benefits of becoming a slightly different person. "Do I want to let go of all the benefits of being a person with social anxiety?" you think. Or maybe it's so subtle that you don't even catch yourself thinking it.
I can't lie that while I'm mildly annoyed with my lack of charisma in social situations, I also enjoy the hell out of my writing sprees. I even enjoy the conceit that the real writing happens when I have something else going on on the side. This garbage blog, Cluttered Papers is an example. I've written more here last week than I've written on my main blog, Five Slices, in weeks. This is a persistent pattern. I always used to write my best stories in college when there was an assignment due at the end of the week or some other deadline was hanging over my head. Once, I was having Kerala Parotta with my friends at Bakehouse at 8 pm (The hungry artist?), persuading myself that I would soon start studying for the exam at 9 am the next day, and an idea for a story turned up that felt so urgent to me that I desperately scribbled it down on a paper napkin so that I wouldn't forget it and sat up till about 12 writing it while feeling the looming dread of the unstudied syllabus...
And you know what? I liked it.
I didn't just like writing that story, I liked the feeling that I was living out something ridiculous and inexplicable that I would look back on and feel amused about. I don't remember which exam that was, how it went, or anything that happened on that next day. But I do remember the euphoria of typing away that story alone in my room under the neon glow of a tubelight with a parched throat, and it was a choice I made. It wasn't helplessness. I wanted it.
The point is, it's your life – interact in groups, don't interact in groups, procrastinate, don't procrastinate, noodle, don't noodle – it's all up to you. But if the struggle between your tendencies escapes your awareness, it'll be a compulsive choice that dictates what you do and you'll feel like a victim being dragged around by the vicissitudes of fate rather than actively choosing to live a certain life, and that sucks. Unless you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. I didn't say that, Carl Jung did. I don't read any of these psychologists. I just memorize a bunch of their quotes and throw them around like any good pop psychologist on the internet.
At least we are able to look at our minds and create images to analyze them in some way. The ancient Greeks (apparently) didn't even understand that their internal monologue and chatter was the echo of their own working mind. They had no ability to introspect. Julian Jaynes was the one who wrote a book on this theory. His theory is that the ancient Greeks had a bicameral mind – one part that spoke, and the other part that listened. They thought that the speaking part wasn't theirs, but a transmitter for messages from the Gods. So when Homer wrote that Zeus did this and Athena did that and Hera said so and so, he might actually have been transcribing the voices he heard in his head. A lot of this doesn't make sense to me – for example, why did everyone have the same set of Zeus/Athena/Hera voices in their head? Didn't they find out any contradictions? Like Socrates walks up to his friend and says, "Bro, Zeus told me that you owe me a beer," and the friend says, "No, Zeus said you owe me a beer." And then they fight about it and they execute Socrates.
Now I don't have any Greek Gods to blame it on, and I have to understand and make peace with the different parts of my mind. And understand that there is no real me. Only the me in me that is talking to the me in you.
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The guy was Bas Ording. Full story here.
Talk is in tamil so lol just read my commentary
For more on this, check the book “The courage to be disliked.”