Thoughts: Who Is For Me?

In therapy, I’ve been struggling to accept that no matter how hard I try, sometimes I’m going to hurt other people–and that sometimes, I can’t or won’t try my hardest, because no one can all the time.

I’ve internalized somehow, and reinforced through some of the discourse I consume, that you can be either good or bad, and goodness must be pure: the slightest adulteration of badness corrupts the whole. Both intentions and actions matter, and they must be beyond reproach to count. Any criticism or failure devalues success.

I know, factually, that this is a ridiculous position to take. I also know that I take it only sometimes–like, it happens way more often when I’m already feeling bad or sad or tired than when I’m feeling okay. And I damn well take it inconsistently, since I apply it only to myself and not to the people around me.

But knowing all this doesn’t stop the feeling. Neither does knowing that feeling this way is actually unconducive to doing good: if criticism short-circuits my ability to function and see myself as fundamentally capable of goodness or quality, I’m discouraging others from criticizing me, and feedback is absolutely essential to doing good. None of us knows how to behave ethically–how to avoid harming others–unless we’re willing to listen to others tell us how things we may not have known about can harm them.

I know myself well enough to know that this is probably at the root of my anxiety about driving–everyone tells me I’m a bad driver, what if I hurt someone and/or their property and/or make them upset with me by driving poorly?–and at the ways I over-criticize my own teaching and writing. As my cousin once thoughtfully expressed it to me, I’m often concerned about “the space [I] take up,” physically and mentally, and I know that leads me to sometimes be over-conscious and leave space empty that ought ideally to be filled. Or to sometimes feel as though taking up any space at all is too much and then get down on myself for not being able to disappear.

A lot of folks struggle with this, or with forms of it. You’d think that with it being so widespread, there’d be plenty of better-known and effective strategies for overcoming it. Sometimes, I convince myself that there are, and that part of my problem is that I want to feel this way so that I never run the risk of meeting my own standards and then having to re-evaluate them to see if I can or should aim higher.

During this pandemic year, I’ve noticed that a lot of the deeper dives I take into questions of ethics help me find new ways to understand Jewish concepts I learned in Hebrew school. Tying my thoughts to a familiar body of work helps me to contextualize what I’m feeling and link it to the wider world I experience. In this case, I found myself thinking of one of Hillel the Elder’s most famous phrases: “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” (im ein ani li, mi li?)

When I first encountered it, it seemed to me to be straightforward, matching many of the messages I’d been fed in books and on TV shows: if you think you can, then you can. You’ve got to have faith in your own ability. Because that message seemed to mischaracterize reality–after all, sometimes we can’t no matter how confident we are–it never spoke to me. Hillel’s question felt over-optimistic.

I better understand a more thoughtful version now. It’s not “if I don’t believe in myself, then no one else has a reason to believe in me, so I’d better believe in myself and show everyone what I’m worth!”, it’s the more measured, “If even I won’t believe I can be good, nobody can convince me otherwise.”

More importantly, it’s not an admonishment to stop being lazy and find that confidence you’ve hidden deep down. This position doesn’t claim that believing in your own capability to be a good person is easy, only that it’s fundamental. To me, this is a reminder to challenge my all-or-nothing thinking. People whose goodness and good actions I admire don’t necessarily naturally think of themselves as good people all the time without effort. Many of them, too, doubt their own capability to do good. But those who do put in the effort to nevertheless see their own potential for goodness.

For me, personally, it’s easy to fall into the trap of relying on others to build my self image as someone who’s able to do good: if other people tell me I’ve helped them, then I’m able to do good after all. That leaves my self-image vulnerable to the instances when other people tell or show me that I’ve hurt them; if my confidence that I can do good depends on others’ feedback, I’m putting myself in a position where, the instant I mess up, I no longer see myself as capable of doing better. As I pointed out above, that’s no good to anyone.

Just as it’s my responsibility to confront the instances when I’ve done wrong and not flinch from my own capability to do evil, it’s also my responsibility to embrace what I’ve done and am doing right, to believe that no matter what mistakes I make, I can be a better person–or at least, as good as anyone else–and do better things.

I tend to put in a lot of work toward the former responsibility, seeking out people who will explain how I’m doing wrong and/or complicit in others’ wrongdoing. I want to know! But often I forget to put in the work toward the second, just as important responsibility.

If I won’t convince myself that I’m capable of goodness, of being better, I’m asking others to do the emotional labour of convincing me. If it’s difficult for me to do, what makes me think it won’t be just as difficult for them to do for me? If not more? Because I’m invested in me in a way nobody else can be–I’m the only self I have, after all. That doesn’t necessarily make it easy, but it does make it right.