On Self-Description

“He says I keep my life in this paintbox

I keep your face in these picture frames

When I speak to the faded canvas it tells me

I have no need for words anyway

And he says I, I am a man

A simple man, a man of colours”

~ ‘Man of Colours’, by Iva Davies

from the Icehouse album “Man of Colours”, 1987

I was catching up with a friend not long ago, and she did something no one else has been able to do for me: she made a convincing and sensible argument for joining the two-hundred-odd million users of the social network known as Twitter.  I’ve used Facebook for a while now, but Twitter was always something I dismissed as a little bit light-weight.  It has been referred to as “the SMS of the internet”, and limits the number of characters in a single message, or “Tweet”, to a mere one-hundred and forty.  Surely no Tweet could ever amount to anything of substance?  Facebook would have to be a far more sensible way of keeping a degree of contact with friends and family, near or far?

Not so, I was told.  Twitter is the place to be, leaving the banalities of life to Facebook.  Twitter was the way to converse with people the world over who share interests close to my own, and to network, to spread the word about what I’m spending my time on, such as this very blog.  Armed with such advice, I sat down at the computer and opened an account.

I’m certain that what happened next is something many others have faced with mixed feelings: the creation of the profile.  Perhaps it’s the typically Australian habit of self-deprecation, but I’ve always seen this as a somewhat pretentious exercise.  I’d much rather let someone else describe me than do it myself, although even the thought of that leaves me cold.  So I started writing with limited space, and came up with something I thought was reasonably fitting.

WonderWoman wandered past and peaked over my shoulder. “That’s not right,” she said.

She made some reasonable points and I made some changes, remembering that nothing I’ve written has ever had a decent first draft.  As one of Twitter’s attributes is brevity, it got me thinking:  Is it possible to define yourself so briefly?  Can one encapsulate oneself in a mere few sentences?  Of course not, not entirely anyway.  I’m reminded, yet again, of David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999):  “You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet…”

In 1943, a psychologist by the name of Abraham Maslow released a paper entitled A Theory of Human Motivation in which he espoused a hierarchy of human needs, starting with the basic physiological elements needed for survival, all the way to what he termed “self-actualisation”.  Self-actualisation can supposedly only occur  when mastery of all the other needs is achieved, and an individual reaches their full potential as a human being.  It’s at the second-to-top level of the hierarchy that Maslow and I cannot fully agree, that of self esteem.  Supposedly, one needs to feel reasonably highly of oneself in order to achieve some form of personal mastery and satisfaction.  To this I cry: horse hockey!  

George Carlin put it like this:  “...studies have repeatedly shown that having high self esteem does not improve grades, does not improve career achievement, it does not even reduce the use of alcohol, and most certainly does not reduce the incidence of violence of any sort.   Because, as it turns out, extremely aggressive, violent people think very highly of themselves!  Imagine that.  Sociopaths have high self esteem.”

It matters little how I see myself, or whether the words I pick to describe myself in the profile are modest or positively glowing.  I’m not complete, I never will be this side of Heaven, and that’s OK.  I’m faulty, like a cracked jar that needs constant refilling so as to keep from running dry.  I have all manner of scars.  I guess I’ve given myself permission to be imperfect, and all the contentment that that permission brings.  It frequently results in a fatalistic attitude and a disinclination to argument (I turned it into a positive in the profile and called myself a pacifist).  The disinclination to fight is often seen as weakness.  I’ve given myself permission not to care about that particular perception from others either.  Too many pour too much time and effort into fighting about things that simply don’t matter.  What a waste.  And besides, the meek will inherit the Earth, right?

I began the Twitter journey in a hope to promote my humble scribblings to a larger audience.  Perhaps I’ll be successful, perhaps not.  I’m not certain what the end-game is, even after all these words, but I knew I had to give whatever it is a try.  I’m getting past an age where I can continue to tread water with who I am and what I’m to become.  It’s time to take some risks and get out there.  Let’s see where we end up together, shall we?

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