The Cruelty of Self-Image

How Subjectivity Muddles Reality

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Disclaimer: Because some people seem to think I regard my words as facts and my opinions right, I feel compelled to tell you everything I write is hypothetical. Seriously. I write what I think is interesting, not what I believe is true. I can’t hold an opinion long enough to call it mine, and professing ownership of something I didn’t invent and doesn’t exist seems senseless. I will contradict myself. Tomorrow, what I think will differ from today. My mind vacillates quicker than a con’s sleight-of-hand, playing three-card monte with my thoughts. I don’t venture to be right and make no arguments. I’m expressing myself. That’s it. To disagree with me is as pointless as cheering for a team while sitting on your couch and watching televised sporting events. 

Though my perception is distorted, my intelligence minimal, and my mind crammed with disparities, I remain dedicated to sharing my thoughts and experiences, undesirable as they may be, and promise to make mistakes.

Take me seriously, not literally.¹

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This essay recklessly expands on a comment I regrettably wrote, on Notes, pasted below, which some people misconstrued, partly because of my sloppy writing. 

Real quick—I’m aware self-image and -perception have slightly different meanings. I use each term loosely in this piece because I am somewhat referring to both while trying to avoid dragging selfhood into the mix—if such a distinction is possible. 

The comment:

“We’re not the people we think we are. We’re the people others think we are. How I view myself means nothing to the outside world. Only objective perceptions determine who we are—superficially, mostly. But those perceptions and judgments usually decide where we can and cannot go and how far we get in life—if you’re into that sort of thing.”

That comment has a flaw at every turn. I know that now. The few people who disagreed, however, wrote replies unrelated to my main point. That I misused the word objective didn’t help. I can’t have an objective view of myself any more than I can have a subjective view of you. Had I been more nuanced, perhaps nobody would’ve thought I was denigrating everybody’s character. 

I wasn’t implying others decide your selfhood. I wouldn’t dare. The modern concept of identity is too slippery for such assertions. Theories of identity are as rife with discrepancies as the contrast between our inner and outer selves. Not to mention, many outer selves are viewed as inner selves but are a collage of attributes learned from living through others’ eyes—so I’ve heard. 

Enough of that.

Reworded, my Note’s comment might say, “In the eyes and minds of others, I am not the person I think I am. Only society’s perception of me determines who I am within it. If I want a job, it depends on others’ perceptions of me, same as college, getting a promotion, an apartment, a house, etc.”

That paragraph is about as pretty as a freshly scrubbed toilet. It seems unexceptional and self-evident, a weak attempt to sound intelligent and insightful. Perhaps I’m attempting to adjust my self-image and influence your perception of me or, at the least, to modify my perception of your opinion of me so I can imagine I’ve impressed you.

Subjectivity muddles reality. 

Rarely are our judgments based on logic. We let our emotions lead us into pseudo-reasoning and make the irrational seem rational. We behave impetuously and justify our motives after the act, manipulating our thoughts to align with our values and needs, even if it means briefly tampering with our self-perception or beliefs and creating transitory personas. This level of self-deception happens frequently in romantic relationships. 

I already regret this.

I’ve been in love twice. Yucky, I know. I dated my first love for five years, lived with her for two, and nearly married her until she abruptly changed the meaning of forever. In 2005, she claimed she needed space and rolled away from me. Her exhaustive sigh when turning off the bedside lamp would’ve insulted me had the click of the lamp’s switch not sounded like a cell door closing.² She said she was too young to settle down, only twenty-three, and gradually listed her grievances, none of which had happened in my reality. Each word she uttered seemed to creep around the unlit room, linger a bit, and then knife into my ears. Though I couldn’t see her, she appeared to think her reasoning was sound, justified, and appropriate. I couldn’t understand. She seemed to believe I’d mistreated her. I assumed she was delusional. 

I thought she was jealous of her single friends and wanted to have the same availability as them, a theory her future behavior would support. It didn’t matter whether her barrage of complaints against me were products of her perception or her imagination. My side of the story was irrelevant. 

Even though she had broken the mold I’d carefully crafted to contain my idea of her, I ignored my judgment and nurtured my image of her. In my mind, I was on all fours, holding her pedestal on my back while crawling in circles and questioning who I had fallen in love with. Had I fallen in love with her or with how she made me feel? Either way, I’d romanticized a dreamy version of her to match the ecstatic emotions elicited from the madness of attachment, a subconscious process of which I wasn’t cognizant until long after the prefix of unconditional had vanished. 

As the months passed, my mind conveniently adjusted memories to placate me, enough to remove my guilt over her accusations and help me simulate moving on. 

Because we’d worked at the same restaurant, I transferred to a different location, moved to a new city, and learned one bad reaction can lead to a string of negative thoughts and smother you with self-hatred.

Thus began my first search for the ninth circle of rock bottom. 

Near my thirties, alone or not, I was lonely, unable to comprehend my mind’s incessant dither, desperate to feel my heart thump. Most of my free time was spent on my couch, hugging a bottle of Jameson. I had assured myself I was a burden on my friends and family, that I was unwelcome and worthless. I felt estranged from humanity. Of course, none of this was true—until I believed it.

Even at a Patriots game in 2011, though I knew the names of every player on the field, wore a jersey matching the crowd’s attire, and had four friends nearby, I felt misplaced and unwanted.

Shortly after kickoff, I told the friend sitting on my left I had to use the bathroom and, drunk and mindless, walked aimlessly past the concession stands lining the concrete walls beneath the upper section, haunting thousands of peripatetic consumers. I was demented, unalive, and so detached from reality that the crowd’s drunken roar seemed a faint hiss. For the entire game, I walked laps with the agility of a Roomba, passing pockets of laughter and excitement, and crashed into people, expecting to feel something. 

When the world seems intangible and your body borrowed, when you can’t seem to pair an emotion with a cause or your heart with your mind, how you perceive yourself could be the difference between becoming an insufferably depressed patient and taking a bubble bath with a toaster. Or you could turn to vodka and aggravate the suffering. Whatever topsy-turvy, downward spiral you choose, you probably won’t shake loose from its grip without changing your self-perception.

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My first thought when hearing the word criminal isn’t an image but a word: stigma. Few people understand better than ex-cons the difficulty of proving you’re not the person society has branded you. I’ve never been a criminal, not in my mind. Yet I’ve been arrested more times than I can remember. 

At age nineteen, I was arrested for receiving and disposing of stolen property—both felonies—resulting in two years of probation and a two-year prison sentence (suspended), which meant when I failed a urine analysis for the second time, in the spring of 1999, while drunkenly visiting my probation officer, I should’ve been locked up for two years. But my public defender did his best impression of a lawyer who had just passed the bar exam on the third try, and offered me the judge’s plea deal: a nine-month sentence in county jail, only six if I behaved, and the felonies became misdemeanors.

I was a kid, inclined to act impulsively, far from prudent, and already an alcoholic. I was not the person the detectives and the judge thought I was. My idea of causing trouble was sitting in my parents' garage with a few friends, a bong, and a thirty-pack. I’d never even been in a fight. 

I don’t know why I’d received an inoperable pistol from my neighbor and handed it off days later to an irresponsible schmuck with a gold chain and a shaved head. Yes, the stolen property I’d been arrested and sent to jail for was a gun. That it was essentially a paperweight—had no bullets and, as far as I knew, couldn’t fire—did not help my case. It was a moronic moment in my life, one that I perpetrated without pondering my actions and their potential consequences. I probably thought handling a gun would make me appear cool and tough. Little me wanted to look bigger. 

I went to jail believing I’d entered a world far beneath me. I had nothing in common with the other inmates. These guys were missing teeth, had tattoos and tempers, talked regularly about masturbation, and called their wives “ol’ lady.” But by the time I left, seven months later and fifty pounds heavier, I thought my return was inevitable, that I belonged there.

Once released, I resumed working as a line cook at the Mexican restaurant where I’d worked prior to my leave of absence. On my first night back, while leaving the restaurant for the night, I saw a correctional officer (CO) from the jail sitting at the bar in what I later learned was his stool. A week or ten after I turned twenty-one, he spotted me in the bar, gleefully waved me over, and bought me a shot of whisky. We became friends, often got drunk together, bar-hopped, went to concerts, and would stumble down Main Street at two a.m., each with an arm around the other’s neck, shouting the lyrics to “Tiny Dancer”.

At a local watering hole one night, I asked the affable CO why he became my friend—it didn’t make sense. “You’re a good dude,” he said. “We all make mistakes. You kept your head down and did your time.

“You didn’t belong there,” he said.

How people interpret my actions and words is out of my hands. Nobody will ever see me how I see me. But if I want people to see a version of me anywhere near my self-image, I must show them I’m more than a crooked nose and reveal myself without exaggeration and misdirection. 

The inner being wants validation, but the outer being screams, “Look what I can do,” and all anybody sees is the act, a moving picture. Acceptance is imperative. Without it, we struggle to believe we’re a writer, an artist, a good person, courageous, beautiful, loving, alive, and such and such and so on. Confirmation drives us. Yet the methods we use to acquire that confirmation might hinder us from truly knowing one another.

It makes sense if you don’t think about it.

Alone, I’m a man with a keyboard who seeks a clearer misunderstanding of himself and humanity. Out of doors, among the ambitious and living, I am a replica of a human being, an imitation, a mockery. I’m a reservoir of doubts, negations, experiences, wishes, desires, urges, etc. I no longer trust my senses and quit entertaining ideas about who I am. Why bother? I’m not even the person I was when I started writing this essay. I’ve lost hair and skin, learned a little, confessed, dug a hole, and had my first facial—courtesy of my daughter. My face hasn’t felt so smooth and soft since my pubescent days. No doubt, I am a changed man. 

The only persistent thing about me is my confusion. 

Okay, how do you end an essay you didn’t intend to write—based on a comment you regret writing and now might reject? 

This essay took a hard right somewhere. It started when I followed my thoughts, put them in words, got stuck in the past, said some things I shouldn’t have, tightened a sentence or three, and qualified fewer words than appropriate. All the commentary I wrote I removed—close to three thousand words. Why? Because the ideas seemed self-evident. I couldn’t wrap my head around the thoughts I wanted to write. I would imagine your perception of me and wonder how severely my imagination affected my behavior and how that behavior influenced your imagined perception of my perception of you. It was as if you and I were standing back-to-back, each taking a selfie. Then I’d think about the brain’s limits, how it incessantly edits and cuts information and builds a narrative like a vision board with magazine cutouts. All I wanted to do was show some experiences related to the topic and make intelligent comments.  

It must end. 

Here are my thoughts:

Don’t let anything define you that somebody can take away.

You can be the most significant significant other and be a terrible significant other.

Nobody knows anything.

If you entertain self-pity and take yourself too seriously, your negative thoughts will own you. Misery can be a habit. 

Don’t go to jail.

Your imagination is not on your side.

Others’ perception of you has too much power.

Appearance might really be everything.

People cannot see your intentions.

It’s easy to confuse criticism with interpretation.

A self-image is just that, an image: elastic and temperamental. Give it too much power, and it will destroy you. Ignore it, and—

Ignore your self-image. No, treat it like a cat who scratches you whenever you try to pet it. But you must occasionally pet it.  

Action requires thought, but thoughts often impede action.

It’s what happens outside your head that people will remember.

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I’ll leave a light on.

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1. Quoted from another piece of mine: here.

2. As with anything that comes from memory, these descriptions might be fabrications, yet they undoubtedly match the emotions I felt.