Where's her Self Respect?

Joan Didion has a slick pen. I read her, I love her, I try to talk about her words, and then I slip on the ink and say something not quite as true. I worry that, in my mouth, her ideas will be less brilliant, and I won't be able to defend them properly. Fortunately, her essays can defend itself.

I first read Didion in high school, but I rediscovered her essay “On Self Respect” when I was at a particularly low moment five years later. I was embroiled in a very intense, very public conflict with some close college friends. It felt like my own respectability was on trial in the season finale of a prime time drama. At night, a certain housemate would listen to me as I sat in his desk chair and talked around and around the problem. He was both comforting and harsh, and either way I put too much stock in his opinion.

The evening after I reread “On Self Respect,” I brought Didion's book to him and told him to read it. It sat on his desk for the remaining months of school. When we were packing to move out, I took it back and found I didn't care anymore whether he'd read it or not. I was on my way up. To hell with what other people think.

One of the many quotable lines that struck me most at the time:

“Self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others-- who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.”

Self-respect is not the same as being respectable, or even about being moral. People too often act as if respectable-moral- and self-respecting are all the same. A woman gets on a subway in a low cut dress and a high cut skirt that clings everywhere it covers, and someone mutters to their friend, “Where's her self-respect?” As in, “I perceive her dress as promiscuous, I have a problem with promiscuity, so I am going to blame her for some deficiency.” It has nothing to do with how the woman in the dress perceives herself. At the same time, someone can look all put together, be admired by his peers, achieve high honors in what he does, and yet exist in an inner world of self-loathing and disgust.

Rather, Didion explains that Self Respect is a discipline of awareness and accountability. It means weighing the cost of your actions, and, if you choose to take an action, accepting and owning the cost. So while self-respect doesn't mean staying within your mothers', your friends', your society's expectations for you, it isn't free license, either. It means holding yourself to expectations that you know that you can sleep with at night.

Those with Self Respect don't writhe in guilt for failing to meet unhelpful expectations other people set for them (i.e. return that phone call, avoid that confrontation, don't masturbate, get married, be a vegan/vegetarian/carnivore, do something useful with yourself, etc.). Nor do they writhe in guilt for making decisions that they later realize were poor. Don't abandon yourself at the scene of the crime by wailing, I didn't mean to! If you practice Self Respect, you accept what you did or didn't do, and know the reasons you did, or didn't. Then move along. Get out of yourself, look outward, and keep weighing the cost of your actions as best as you possibly can.

Didion reminds me, too, that good decisions can also be tough, and have cost, and require sacrifice. Seeing these decisions through is what she calls character. In a white-people-problems sort of way, I think of 'character' in terms of not whining when you're on hour nine of a long day of hiking in the middle of a backcountry desert on some wilderness survival adventure. Everyone else on the trip is the same boat as you, and you signed up, so be accountable to yourself and don't make yourself a weight for everyone else to bear. Drink your water, tend to your blisters and maybe even try to cheer someone else up.

But that's really just character-building for the bigger stuff. Having the gumption to go for a career where there supposedly is no future of a big break, an open position, or good pay; or taking a difficult job full of difficult people for the half-victories that you know are worth it. It's getting sober and it's telling difficult truths that need to be told. It's sticking to the terms of a break-up you initiated, even if it feels terrible in the moment. It's speaking out against a system you find unjust, even when there is no one else in support of you.

In short, Self Respect is faith in your own judgment, and faith that you can develop your own judgment.