Solid
I love my daughter more than words can say. We spent the evening together, just the two of us, and I treasured every minute of it. A small moment came up tonight, something that had surfaced earlier this week as well, and it has me reflecting.
My daughter is entirely her own person. She is wonderfully unlike me in countless ways. But every now and then I catch a glimpse of something familiar and find myself wondering whether some of her characteristics are also traits I once possessed before they were slowly worn down, simply buried beneath the ordinary pressures of growing up, or even hidden beneath the adaptations I accumulated along the way.
She is a people pleaser. She is emotionally intelligent and cares deeply about others, but she is also hyper-attentive to how she is perceived because she desperately wants to belong. She is quick to adjust her response to match what she believes others expect of her.
She'll say, "I like pink," and another child will respond, "Well, we like purple." Without hesitation she'll answer, "I meant purple! I don't know why I even said pink."
I don't think it's just about fitting in. It's something more complicated than that. It's a desire to make everyone around her happy, to preserve harmony, to smooth over even the smallest ripple of disagreement. She can almost convince herself that purple was her favorite all along. If she repeated "I love purple" to herself often enough, I suspect she'd eventually believe it.
Earlier this week I described it as "dishonest," but that isn't quite right. Dishonesty implies an intention to deceive. She isn't trying to fool anyone. She is trying to belong so completely that she loses sight of what actually belongs to her. Those are very different things.
She will slowly reshape her own preferences until they match the expectations of the people around her. I suppose, in a sense, she is dishonest but only to herself, and only until the borrowed opinion begins to feel like her own. It is over-accommodating. It is self-erasure. It is surrendering her own voice and confusing peacekeeping with truth.
It gives me pause because I recognize the tendency. Perhaps that's why I have become so analytical as an adult. I audit myself often, trying to distinguish between what I genuinely believe and what I merely absorbed from the world around me because it was easier or more agreeable. One of my very first musings was about this. It felt exceedingly important that I not do that in this space. This space must be a pursuit of truth.
Of course, honest self-examination rarely looks tidy. Sometimes it feels less like quiet reflection and more like standing in the middle of a weather system while every internal barometer swings wildly from one reading to the next.
Over time, though, I have come to know myself. The point isn't endless navel-gazing. The point is having the courage to turn and face yourself honestly. It takes courage and curiosity to ask the questions, humility to accept the answers, and wisdom to decide what ought to change. For me, this is what it means to stop “saving face”. I see who I am. I am Taken. I am Steady. I am solid.
There is nothing noble about never yielding. Sometimes love asks us to make room. Sometimes wisdom asks us to make changes. But neither should happen until we've first discovered our own mind.
I don't want to teach my daughter stubbornness. I don't want to raise someone who is incapable of compromise. I want to teach her the difference between changing her mind because she has been persuaded and changing herself because she is afraid not to.
I want her to learn how to distinguish what she actually thinks from what she has absorbed simply because it kept everyone else comfortable. That kind of epistemic honesty is difficult. She doesn't understand that distinction yet.
This has reminded me of a reflection I wrote years ago about curation. Reading it again, I still very much think of curation, not as deception, rather an authentic attempt to communicate not only to others but also to ourselves. Perhaps it can live a second life here.
Curation
“Man does not create, he discovers.”
— Antoni Gaudí
In high school I kept this quote in the front of my notebook. It helped remove the pressure to create something novel and separate the desire for attention from an instrument of expression. (Having such creative siblings who cared so much about being significant and attributing their own value to their craft was really challenging to separate at times. But that’s probably just being a teenager.) There is nothing new under the sun, and as Gaudí says, if we don’t create, what we are actually doing is curating what God has created. That is beautiful.
Life is curation.
How to apply attention. It’s constantly choosing, right?
A dynamic, and often messy, pursuit of excellence - not perfection.
Sometimes the wrong choice is made, and you can feel the friction between the medium and the truth that was trying to be shared.
If the heart is in the right place, then maybe curation isn’t deception, rather an authentic attempt to communicate not only to others but also to ourselves.
Don’t confuse knowing about yourself and knowing yourself. Whatever you learn through self-observation is about you. It is not you. It is content, not essence.
— Eckhart Tolle
Maybe the more we share the closer we get to capturing the essence? Or maybe volume has nothing to do with it. Maybe I’m just trying my make myself feel better because I’m unsure if I’m still doing it with you. Maybe what I need is to spend a little more time reflecting on the intersection between honesty, transparency, discretion, and tact.