responsibility

growing up

Much of adulthood, it seems to me, involves making the uncertain but promising decision and bearing the mantle of responsibility—saying something like, whatever happens, you won’t have to clean up my mess; I am going to act in all of our best interests; if this whole thing falls flat on its face I promise I will make my best effort to get us out of here.

There’s more nuance to it, of course. Being able to take responsibility requires knowing your capacity to take responsibility, and pushing that edge at a reasonable clip. I work at a little startup and I get to watch my CEO in action every day—I don’t have the expertise to do his job; I won’t for at least five, ten years. He takes responsibility for making hundreds of things happen, things that I never even knew were possible until I started working this job. And he does it all with immense joy and candor. I don’t think that’s a coincidence: watching yourself hazard a guess and deliver on it time and time again, putting out your own fires like clockwork, is wildly cup-filling. You get to see the shape of your own soul.

Seeing the shape of your own soul is strange because the more you accept how bizarrely specific you are, the easier it gets to accept how bizarrely specific other people are. You individuate; you see that your woundedness is deep and strange and houses thousands of ghosts that have basically nothing to do with any individual conflict with another human being. You take responsibility for your own anguish, your own regret, your fear, weariness, sorrow. You can meet other people and request they lay their hands across your woundedness, and meet their response with curiosity and grace, trying not to take it personally if they flinch away. Of course it’s impossible to not take it personally, but you can try.

As a performer, your charm comes from the fact that you’re taking responsibility for the fallout of your performance. If you flub a note, the audience can trust that you won’t coerce them into a particular posture of reassurance or exaggerated positivity.¹ You own your successes as well as your mistakes. You’re making a pact with them that you will take responsibility for maintaining your own dignity.

Keeping the flame of my own dignity alive is tremendously challenging. Many days I want to fold and say, I give up, I can’t do it, I feel pathetic and I’m never going to stop feeling pathetic. But nobody can give me my dignity except for me, and I feel a responsibility towards the world to maintain it, so I show up each day with a hand cupped around that flame, sometimes burning fiercely, sometimes barely a flicker, but always alive.

I’ve always struggled with confidence or maturity as north stars. Growing up they felt fickle and distant, like maybe one day I’d pass through some veil and finally understand what they meant, or maybe I wouldn’t; I had no idea how to cross that threshold. I don’t think very hard in terms of becoming more confident or mature anymore. They’re a little too external for me, like, maybe if I copy the behaviors of this confident person I admire enough I’ll get confident. I think there is some imitating involved in the taking of responsibility, but mostly for me it involves a lot of interocepting, seeking and then accepting the shape of my soul. Once you kind of hit the texture of your own being, you’re like, oh, OK, so I’m not going to be any other way, so I might as well live it in full force. And then it gets so fun to keep peeling back the layers of bullshit and performance that you can’t stop doing it; you want to keep trying things, and seeing what happens, and the “cleaning up your messes” along the way starts to feel incidental, like, sure, let me tidy up that workbench, I need to go make new things on it.

1. People who demand nothing of you (or, notes on charismatic people)