Confidence, Cohen!

the pains and the pleasures of unravelling oneself

Blame social media if you want, but we are a generation that overanalyses everything, not least of all ourselves. 

Tom Ripley was right, Caravaggio slaps.

The feeling of being too much inside one’s own head is so widespread that this Jemima Kirke story has turned into a meme. Like Dorian Gray and Narcissus before him, looking too closely at our own reflections has turned out to be a curse, of sorts. I’m in a skincare subreddit where women will constantly post closeup photos of their faces, proceed to ask us what is wrong with their skin and it’s usually just… normal human skin; a living organ with pores, and texture and that yeah, eventually ages. 

Maybe looking so much and so often at our owns faces will make us obsess over things that are not really there, fabricating insecurities that no one else on earth would even imagine we could possibly have. 

We also obsess over our bodies, our minds. Here’s a tutorial to sit and to get up like an elegant woman; the A to Z of quiet luxury; how to get rid of hip dips; here’s the best place to get a filling for your old-looking hands. Astrological charts, personality types, DNA tests to find out if you’re 1% Finnish or 8% Scottish and while you’re at it, why don’t you just give some random company your biodata free of charge. Are you a Miranda or a Samantha, and which Wendy’s dessert are you actually?

I was a big fan of The OC at age 10-11, when its best seasons (1 and 2) first aired. It was, like most teen dramas, a bit deranged, I think, but since I loved it so intensely at such a formative age, I still bear some marks of its impact upon me. I owe the genesis of my musical taste to Seth Cohen. I still use the you know what I like about rich kids? quote more often than most normal people would advise. I still love Marissa Cooper. And I can never forget Anna’s parting words to Seth at the airport:

Anna, wait a second. What am I gonna do without you?

Confidence, Cohen!

Throughout the past twelve months I’ve been going through an existential crisis that is not actually about my age, my weight, or how much money I make. So in other words, a healthy one. Confidence, Cohen! It’s really a conversation between me and myself. The unravelling I have been undergoing is an intentional one. Trying on new versions of me has revealed that the ones I am happier with are not new at all, but iterations of me that I’ve been before and that I was socialised into suppressing. So rather than looking in, I've been looking back. Not for nostalgia’s sake, but because to be the best version of myself at 31, I need to reconnect with that awesome version of myself from when I was 7. So ironically, I am being just as self-involved as Seth, while recklessly thinking about myself a bit too much (and that’s awesome).

When I was a little girl, I was LOUD. As an only child who spent a lot of time playing on her own, I was always so happy to just talk to other kids, to random teenagers who would either find it really cute or really annoying, to adults in public transport (don’t worry, I had my mum with me!). For family reasons I often found myself in situations where I was the new girl in school or the new kid on the block - or apartment building. But what I remember from those times is that I loved making new friends, I didn’t care about being new. I was hungry for human connection and went out of my way not to blend in, but to really, truly connect, to add myself to the mix. I loved wearing colourful clothes, I loved birthday parties, I liked to buy pepperoni pizza at the school cafeteria and share it with a friend. I loved Barbie - not in an oppressive, I-need-to-grow-up-into-a-blonde-lady-with-perfect-proportions, but in a fun, now-I-can-create-and-enact-stories-of-my-own kind of way. I was confident, I loved sports, I pranked my friends often, and I was always the first to volunteer to sing at church. I just really, really loved being alive in the world. I missed this mini-me and began to wonder where she went.

I’m not being naïve. I know growing up is challenging. You won’t be the bubbliest version of yourself all the time and I accept that. But what irks me and has led me to start unpicking some of the threads that made me into who I am today is that I feel that a lot of times what looked like growing up was really a closing-in. I was not really always transforming into the person I was meant to be, but learning to hide the most vibrant, shiny, the most me parts of myself so as not to bother others. There’s a certain point in your life where people start to expect you to make yourself smaller to make room for them. Blend in, blend in, blend in: everybody plays the game, and if you don’t you’re called insane. And even if you rebel a bit, it’s a little like Franny and Zooey

Everything everybody does is so — I don't know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much only in a different way.

And that was it for me. I was socialised into becoming more subdued, more aligned with the group even as I made my stand: I was the smart one, or the strange one, or the one with the eyeliner. But I didn’t just want to be one. I struggled with this in middle school, when kids usually become a bit mean and if you’re not mean back they chew you up and spit you out. I felt that I was still being me because I clung to some of my favourite quirks to measure myself against others, but it was very Salingerian in a way, because I turned into such a quiet person. So I slowly turned into the shy one. I would never make the first move to get to know somebody. If I thrived in new environments before, now I just observed for ages. When I finally found that I could trust someone, they’d be surprised by the fact that I would never actually shut up. Yes! bubbly and talkative me was back, but only when it felt safe.

Because I kept telling myself I was shy, or reserved, or an introvert, I started believing it. I spent most of my twenties with not much room to figure myself out because I was always so busy. Ten years of rushing, working, proving myself (whoever to?).  Hence this unpicking of the threads. I’ve been carefully inspecting them, checking if they’re really mine or someone else’s. A classmate’s, a teacher’s, a friend’s. And as I regather myself, I can see that same round, smiley face surrounded by dark messy curls. I don’t have to stop being her to be me. She was so genuine in inhabiting this body, in leaving her mark on this planet. I like her very much.

So I guess I don’t care about my large pores, or about strangers’ opinions of my outfits or social media posts. I do care a lot about connecting with others and communicating with them, don’t get me wrong. But I do it for myself. The only person I aim to impress is that little girl celebrating her 7^th birthday at McDonalds.

So the question I present to you today is, who do you care to impress? (why?)