the box can be redrawn
or, on being audacious
I’ve come to realise, much later in life than I should have, that what you believe determines everything.
For me, that belief is that I cannot and should not take up space. I have justified it in a colourful variety of ways: I’m giving someone the benefit of the doubt. I’m letting them have a real chance at something. I’m sitting back to watch how things pan out. I’m reserving judgement. I’m not naturally bold. I’m minding my place in the world. Deep down, I probably knew I was making excuses. But, as Joan Didion articulately put it in her essay On Self Respect, “self-deception remains the most difficult deception”. And indeed it was. That self-deception has led, more often than not, to me being absolutely steamrollered over.
To break out of this self-deception is hard. In the rush of life, where obligations and pressures ceaselessly press upon our mental and emotional faculties, it’s way too easy to relinquish this authorship and allow societal currents to sweep us into pre-constructed narratives. I have to admit, unthinking acceptance is temptingly easy. There is an pernicious comfort in toeing the line, even standing a couple steps behind it — but before we know it, we’re witnessing first-hand the slow erosion of our self and agency. We’re no longer delineating for ourselves the realities that we want to inhabit. Life becomes a litany of mundane or unpleasant things we do because either someone demanded or expected it of us, or we think they will demand or expect it of us.
But therein lie the conditions for a new dawn of self-respect. I will borrow from Didion again:
Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect.
It’s made me realise that 80% of what’s standing between me and future achievements I’ll look back on with joy is simply the audacity. Not courage, or strength, or boldness. Audacity.
Audacity, like selfishness, gets a bad rap. Look up its definitions in the world’s best dictionaries: Courage or confidence of a kind that other people find shocking or rude. A disregard of restraints commonly imposed by convention or prudence. A willingness to take bold risks.
It seems to me like audacity is painted as an intrinsic struggle between individuality and social cohesion — claiming your place and knowing your place. Society would expect “knowing your place” to win out. Which is why, as children, we’re often inundated with songs of sacrifice and selfless virtue. What we aren’t taught is how wide the chasm is between being bold and being reckless. Making space and taking space. We’re made to think it’s a razor-thin line, and that any act of assertion or claiming something for ourself instantly sticks an invisible black mark on our forehead.
Where courage is a solemn commitment to action irrespective of fear, audacity enjoys the flamboyant display of rebellion against the norms and the safe. I have been courageous. I have taken slow, careful, calculated steps into the dark. But I have never flung myself at it. That calls for absolute surety and confidence that whatever is on the other side is something you can deal with. It calls for taking up space unabashedly, because the world owes it to you.
British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, for example, met many patients who were high-performing, prestigious, and distressed because they had quashed the inner freedom to say “no”. If that is being good, then being bad (in a healthy way) sounds better: it would mean finding that inner freedom and using it to actively choose and chase what we want to, even if it might be disconcerting for others. That does a miraculous thing: it disentangles our ambition for life from our desire to meet the expectations of others. And there, in that expanse that lies between stifling conventionality and complete ostracisation, is where we find agency, and bend the arc of history to our will.
We might be in a box, but the lines can be redrawn.