Continuing with yesterday’s post, today we have the final two paragraphs in Joan Didion’s On Self Respect.
To have that sense of one's intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out—since our self-image is untenable—their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course we will play Francesca to Paolo, Brett Ashley to Jake, Helen Keller to anyone's Annie Sullivan: no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we can not but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the necessity of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.
It is the phenomenon sometimes called alienation from self. In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that one's sanity becomes an object of speculation among one's acquaintances. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves—there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.
What Didion calls self-respect I think could be even better described as self-ownership. Why? I think you can respect yourself and still fail to avoid the temptation to constantly mold yourself in the shape of others’ expectations of you. You can also respect yourself and fail to take responsibility for your choices and their consequences. In fact, maybe when some people fail to take responsibility for their failures, the primary cause is a bit too much self-respect, or at least self-admiration.
Self-ownership, on the other hand, makes clear that we are ultimately responsible for everything that we do (or don’t do). More importantly, this responsibility is ours alone — while others might have hopes and expectations for us, these can’t ultimately decide our behavior. And while we may feel obligations to them — these are ultimately obligations borne of our values and which can only be enacted (or not) through our conscious choice.
With true self-ownership, there is no need to hide from ourselves, nor to hide ourselves from others, nor to change ourselves according to the wishes of others (at least as a primary cause).
We’re the captains of our own ships, and for better or worse, the course we sail is our own.