#9 An antidote to socially rewarding self-betrayal

Bullies, believers, and how to better honour our creative selves

My writing tends to take on the voice of my bullies. I show up at my desk wounded, shot down each time I imagined myself a writer. Shot down by whom, though? I wish I could say that a bully once told me I wasn’t a ‘real writer’ and I started writing to prove them wrong - can you imagine the origin story it would have made!

What do you do when it’s your own brain you’re against?

After my previous piece about authenticity & pretence did well, I spent a lot of time feeling like an impostor. This voice that said I was an impostor got so strong that I began to dislike everything I wrote. The words on the screen stopped feeling like they were mine; my writing was beginning to look not like it was trying to please me, but like it was trying to convince an external audience that it was worthy. This was counterintuitive, especially considering all the encouraging things people said.

Weird, I thought, to assume disapproval without having received it. 

Was I letting my own brain bully me? 

The bully vs. the believer

Our brains tend to develop two kinds of voices: the bully, and the believer. The bully is sharp, laser-focused, and collects any information it can about the lack of our potential. The believer, on the other hand, is a small person with a soft voice, sifting through the compliments we discredit for general politeness, in search of remotely believable fragments of our worth.

The believer whispers feeble encouragement, when the bully shouts out disapproval with conviction. It’s hardly a fair fight.

The bully is born from fear. Fear’s raison d'être is to make sure we conform & fit in. On the other hand, hope, however fragile, is the believer's driving force. The bully’s voice is rooted in the fear of not being enough - of not measuring up against the rest of the world. Fear of somehow being left behind. The bully, owing to this fear, makes sure we conform, fit in, and eliminate any possibility of disapproval. The bully’s job is to make us feel small - lest we might occupy ‘too much’ space in the world (and be shunned for it). Naturally, its best friends are inhibition & pretence. The more inhibited we are, the more muted our authentic creativity gets, the ‘safer’ we're likely to be.

As a writer, my bully wins when I ‘create content’¹. My believer sighs a heavy sigh. 

Authenticity is expensive

Some people spend their lives never having truly met their believer: an entire life spent trying to get better at fitting in, and consequently getting worse at being their authentic selves.

The bully, owing to its kinship with fear, has the potential to make us conventionally successful. Pick a safe thing; a path that ‘guarantees’ acceptance. Learn all the ways of those before you. Follow to the T. Emerge somewhere on the plane of conventional success. Find yourself in the race you think you have to win.

The initial cost of authenticity is a lack of belonging. That is why attempts at creativity are met with intense resistance - there’s a chance your creativity (and by extension an authentic you) won’t be received well. This lack of guaranteed acceptance is why most people never pursue authentic creative expression beyond an initial attempt, if at all. On the flip side though, I imagine that the payoff is a life you don’t regret having wasted trying to dodge disapproval from an imaginary audience.  

It’s a tough decision. It’s also one that determines the kind of stories you’ll tell when you’re older. I’m realising that I’m after stories that are full of colour, character, adventure, and growth — conformity be damned.

If you, like me, find yourself feeling inhibited by the rules; if you feel like you’ve become an expert at following these rules, here’s a silver lining: you’ll know which ones you can break. The surprisingly simple discovery is that from the buffet of rules you’re offered, you get to choose which ones to add to your plate.

This brings me to the believer.

Nurturing the believer 

The believer can go unheard, unrecognised amidst all the noise the bully makes. Remember, the bully is loud, often deafening. In light of this, our duty to ourselves might just be this: to feed the believer; to nurture it; to hold it with as much, if not more, strength as we hold on to the bully. Nurturing the believer is difficult because it involves breaking rules we thought were sacrosanct, and this is likely to make some people uncomfortable.

A renowned physicist whose work I’ve been poring through lately said something in an interview that I have’t been able to shake off: Society rewards self-betrayal. It seems simple, yet powerful.

Choosing to nurture the believer is the antidote to pretence. How might we do this? How might we actively become the agents of our lives? Here’s a three-step blueprint I’m working with:

First, ruthless curation. Pick what you want your energy to be poured into. This means cutting off from the roles you’ve played that no longer serve you; unlearning the ways in which you tend to go against your gut; curating the people you want in your life, the ways in which you want to interact with the world, and how you want to be interacted with.

Curation is hard because it is limiting. Curation highlights what you’re choosing but it also highlights what you’re actively not choosing, and that can be scary.

Second, cultivate an unwavering faith in your gut. The gut is the believer’s voice telling you what’s right for you. Interestingly, there is abundant research that explains the gut-brain connections, and how deeply important ‘gut-feelings’ are.

Third, make decisions from a place of hope & abundance (versus fear and scarcity). In other words, let the believer take the reins. Let the believer reign, and use the bully to warn you about potential dangers.

Like any attempt at growth, nurturing your believer is easier said than done. I’m approaching this with the expectation that it might take several tries. The tendency to give in to socially-approved self-betrayal is natural and often all-encompassing. But in writing this (newsletter), I’m trying to execute a search query to find people who think the same way, so that I can learn from them. Writing is my attempt at curation. Here’s an excerpt from Austin Kleon’s recent post:

So what do you write about to find your people?

You ask yourself: What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago (or a week ago, or however fast you write)? If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write. And you do not dumb it down, because you were not stupid six months ago, you just knew less. You also write with as much useful detail and beauty as you can muster, because that is what you would have wanted.

If you do this, Karlsson says, “You will write essays that almost no one likes…. Luckily, almost no one multiplied by the entire population of the internet is plenty if you can only find them.”

If you’re an almost no one, say hi.

Curating ruthlessly,

Yashmi

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Thank you, Chris, Theresa, & Jeremiah from the Foster community for all the feedback.

1. On a very related note, if you work in marketing, or just generally find yourself thinking about internet writing, here’s Foster’s Media Strategy that I haven’t stopped thinking about.