On Rediscovering Self-Respect
Once, in a hot season, in a small notebook, I wrote with my fifteen-year-old fingers a story with a Persian title ‘Tarashidam, Parastidam, Shikastam’ that meant ‘I carved, I worshipped, I destroyed’. I wrote in small, black letters, ‘The worst cage one can find oneself in is others’ understanding of one’s self’ for it is a lockless cage one can forever be locked in. To see yourself through other’s eyes is to give someone the driving seat of your car and let them take you wherever they want.
The moment one is stripped of the delusion that one is unique, the world becomes much smaller and less magical. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind that had just begun doubting itself nonetheless made a record of the tremors that slowly begin displacing the earth on which a ‘self’ stands. I recall with startling clarity the sensation of vertigo that is not due to a fear of heights but because of losing one’s ground, the standing in one’s eyes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.
I had been selected to be deputy prefect for my class. I did not accept it, as I was told not to accept it. I stood in front of my instructor, and murmured that I would like to give it up. Stunned, she asked me why and I mumbled something like not having enough time to devote to it. She said to me, I still remember, ‘But Ilma, no one deserves it more than you do. I strongly persuade you to take it’. But I was so keen on being someone else’s version of myself that I folded my self-respect and placed it beneath my shoes, such that it could no longer be seen. That day, I learnt a new skill, ‘the art of self sabotage’. To this day, when someone presents me with an opportunity, and I hear myself say no, I can not fathom the deep, dark well from where the perfectly rehearsed no swells forth. I turn into someone else, like the robot behind phone calls, who keeps repeating the same response no matter what you ask. But unlike the robot, I remember the sensation too–so in my perfect repeat performance, I repeat the sensation too. I shrivel into someone smaller, much smaller than I am, when I proudly say no.
In her article titled ‘On Self-Respect: Joan Didion’s 1961 Essay from the Pages of Vogue’, she writes:
“I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.”
Once I lost my footing, I lost some of my vision too. I began gathering lenses from people to see myself, and what I wanted in life. If I saw anyone wearing glasses around me, I asked them to give me theirs, so I could see myself, and see the world around me. When I had to use my own eyes, I picked up a magnifying class, and magnified the least flattering parts of myself, in order to produce a louder no the next time.
Self-respect, it turns out, has nothing to do with others. It is like being alone in a cell–with no one but you. There is no one to fool– no one to clap, no one to hear stories featuring you as the protagonist, no one to beam into a smile to congratulate you. It is you–with your cracked skin–the skin stitched of self-worth borrowed from others’ opinion of you. When the opinion changes, your skin starts falling apart. And you sit alone–losing skin–losing your face to the world.
To be without self-respect is to be a scientist who has mastered the art of oratory. It is to pick up a magnifying glass and look at unglamorous parts of yourself through a microscope. It is to find reasons to support the hypothesis that you are worthless. Once you find parts of you that are unflattering, you zoom in, jot down, and memorize. You repeat, over and over again, what you saw. Then you begin the act of teaching through story-telling. You invite people and share your findings with them. They agree and clap at your discoveries. That night, when you can not fall asleep, it is because you spent another day convincing yourself that you are nothing more than your base instincts.
The lilting joy of recovering self-respect is like finding a lost lens–a pair of glasses that lets you see. It lets you see clearly the contours of your being, and what makes you uniquely you, with all your blemishes, all imperfections. When you take the driving wheel of your life back, the world leaps towards you in a new light. The small steps you take–and fall down–teach you a way to walk.
You pull down clothes on your body, and you realize that it is not the clothes that make you you–but rather you who gives color to the clothes.
Cannot thank you enough for writing this 🙏🏼 this is so relatable