Teaching the courage to be unique
Anglo-Irish literary aesthete, prodigy and queer icon Oscar Wilde advised:
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
Like so much of his language, the words flit quicksilver from the tongue, they practically trail champagne bubbles. Oscar Fingal O’Fflahertie Wills Wilde could make being himself look like the most glamorous role in the world.
Being himself also cost him his freedom, reputation, health, love and — arguably — years of life; he was just 46 when he died.
It is Wilde we should think of when we hear anyone, especially a young person, glibly advised to “be yourself” — as if the profound self-awareness and integrity this requires were dispensed at birth.
It isn’t.
“The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition – in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all – and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery” George Orwell opined in ‘Why I Write’.
To be oneself requires a sense of self, requires a person to have thought hard about who they are as an individual and in relation to others.
Currently, I’m supporting a number of ultra-high-net-achievement high school seniors as they write their college application essays.
These students have activities lists longer than any of my limbs. They hold patents and run non-profits, perform with orchestras and win sport trophies. They are intense, bright, thoughtful, superbly educated and supremely motivated. Yet they struggle to be themselves.
What does this say about you? I ask over and over, trying to steer the recitation of accolades and inventions into self-reflection territory.
It feels a little unfair to ask these kids to do yet more work, but my reservations are outweighed by my hope that this work will bear fruit beyond the immediate goal of college acceptance.
All of these students will thrive wherever they end up (though some don’t yet realize that). What could trip them up, though, is continuing to base their sense of self on externally ratified achievements.
Anglo-American education systems organize around grades, exam scores and ‘extracurriculars’ — the latter too often undertaken for resume-padding purposes rather than out of spontaneous interest.
All their lives, children are taught to compete and measure their worth by arbitrary, little-understood scales. Those who score the highest are axiomatically the most invested; it must appear to them from where they stand that success depends on continuing to colour within the lines and measure themselves by others’ standards.
This works for a while, or longer, but at some point every person will find themselves wanting to do the ‘wrong’ thing. For Wilde, that was being himself in his love life. Making the right decision for himself came at a high cost. But it was a cost Wilde, on analysis, was prepared — indeed glad — to bear.
[Humility] is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh development. It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor later. Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life, of a new life, Vita Nuova for me. Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it.
Now I have realised that it is in me, I see quite clearly what I ought to do; in fact, must do. And when I use such a phrase as that, I need not say that I am not alluding to any external sanction or command. I admit none. I am far more of an individualist than I ever was. Nothing seems to me of the smallest value except what one gets out of oneself. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with. — De Profundis
Being oneself is not a panacea, nor the path to nirvana, but it is the only way to own success and learn from one failure.
It is the only way to hold the winning hand in that well-lit back alley where, as Joan Didion put it, one holds assignations with oneself.