[Alfalfa, of the Our Gang comedies, sings of his love for sweet little round-faced, soft-focus Darla. And yes, I know: the song title doesn't have that extra syllable in it. :)]
Whom, exactly, do you try to impress?
Note that I’m not asking about classes or groups of people. Most of us would like to be regarded favorably by our families and friends, our co-workers, the critics and audiences, and maybe even — ha ha — total strangers on the bus and in, ahem, Genuine Joe’s coffee shop (little in-joke there). And I know we’re not all “on” all the time, even the most determined poseurs among us: everyone has moments of utter un-self-consciousness, when our guard is down, we’re at our easiest and most natural, and we’re not actively evaluating what someone might think of us.
No, I’m just wondering, well…
Consider a favorite activity of yours: something you do well, whether it’s gardening, writing, playing soccer or pinochle, developing software or Web pages, raising kids, photography, “doing music,” driving without a map… whatever.
Got one? Good.
Now consider: Even if you can’t consciously summon up the face of a specific individual at the time you’re doing whatever it is, can you think of a specific person now that I’ve asked you about it?
Lots of times, I’m conscious — although only in retrospect — that the one person whose face I wish I could see as she read something of mine would be a particular college professor; call her Mrs. R (although that’s no longer her name, as far as I know). One cool thing about the fact that she really, really liked my writing: she wasn’t a slavish fan. Thus when I wrote something well, and she praised it, it genuinely pleased me. As for her criticism, she often made comments which (however true) genuinely smarted. Or rather, they would have done if she hadn’t couched them in a joke.
(One example: I take punctuation in my own writing very seriously — even its omission (which can accomplish all kinds of effects that the marks themselves cannot). I was always fussy about it. And that’s why Mrs. R’s sarcasm would’ve stung rather than made me laugh, had she just circled passages in red rather than awarded me a construction-paper gold star from “The Department of Hyphens, Parentheses, and Dashes.”)
(Jeez, do I miss her. And I haven’t even seen her in over 30 years.)
At other times, when I’m talking or writing about music — especially old music — I see my Dad’s face. He’s either smiling, if I’ve done it right, or, if I haven’t, he’s got his brows all furrowed up like a satellite photo of an Iowa cornfield. (The latter was the look he offered when I tried to convince him that the rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears was a rock band he’d like to listen to. Because, y’know, they used horns and stuff. For some mysterious reason, he couldn’t or just wouldn’t connect the dots between Frank Sinatra and David Clayton-Thomas.)
In Seems to Fit, one character hero-worships a couple of others. On one hand, this might be a problem. The experts say, and they are right, that conflict drives a story; this would seem to suggest a sagging story line whenever A looks to B or C for approval. But I think I’ve worked around this all right, with conflicts derived from that superficial harmony:
- A can never quite live up to the standard he imagines B or C to embody;
- B really scorns A, appreciates his strengths but despises his weaknesses (as B perceives them); and
- C regularly interposes himself between A and B, ensuring that B will not actually hurt A.
Whose face do you see, even if just in your mind’s eye, when you want to know you’ve succeeded? From which specific audience member do you imagine the sound of applause, laughter, or — as the case may be — uncontrollable weeping?
A good question. And even after being asked, I’m not sure. I think I see different faces for different things I do well and hope to “impress” each on differently on different days. That’s not much of an answer, I realize, but it’s honest.
I’ll be sure to pay attention next time I write who it is I see in my head when I finish it, though. :)
Well, dammit, you caught me on a truthy binge and, therefore, I can’t even divulge that. I wonder how many other readers find themselves in that fix.
What I can say is that my mother taught me to hang out with people I admire; I’ve latched onto a blogroll of folks who are so much more savvy than I about politics or writing or philosophy or science or anything else I find valuable or attractive, I hesitate to post at all. It takes some nerve. With every post, I’m thinking about one of them who, in my opinion, has set the bar just out of my reach.
And that’s called blogger’s block. In the end, I have to explode all of my icons and ask myself if I came anywhere close to expressing my thoughts and feelings. I have to convince myself that close counts.
I have a published author friend who’s known me since 7th grade. She’s who I see when I click PUBLISH for my posts. In the gym, I’ve got an an old friend telling me to smile as she’s sitting in the back of my head. And when I visit my mom, it’s my mom who’s watching and approving/disapproving. Mostly, though, I have myself as my harshest critic.
Although, I must say that I, too, have memories of English teachers gone by….
a/b
Darc: I think we all have mentors — even just “Wow, don’t I wish s/he were my mentor!” ones — whose approval we crave. I sometimes wonder if Mrs. R ever knew, or even guessed, how much weight her opinion carried. In hindsight, it seems now that I must’ve been like the girl in that poem, who “Who wept with delight when you gave her a smile,/And trembled with fear at your frown.”
Nance: A, er, “truthy binge”? That’s a good thing, right? Or is this truthy like the one at the root of Colbert’s “truthiness”?
Like me, you seem to have a lowercase-”c” catholic view of blogging, which is to say, omnivorous. I’ve told the story so many times, it seems, of how I’d created — and let languish — something like three or four blogs before RAMH… let them wither, because they were each about one topic, and I just couldn’t make myself write about ONE thing for more than a year(ish).
a/b: Family members and longtime friends (and old school teachers) seem to be favorite “I’m inspired by” faces for a lot of people.
But damn, worrying about needing my OWN approval… I’d never get anything done. :)
@John – Learning to be less harsh on ourselves is one of the truths (not a truthy truth or truthiness but an honest to goodness verity) of aging successfully, I think. A certain amount of self-censorship is necessary, but depriving the world of the wonderfulness that is you, berating yourself because you’re not as fast or facile or capable as you or anyone else was or is now, well, if you can still follow this sentence you should pat yourself on the back and say “Job well done!” You should be very proud of the words you write, you omnivorous blogger.
a/b
Ah, I don’t want to impress anyone at Genuine Joe’s if they are impressed in the wrong way. And how to control that?
I want to impress my mother, the woman who sells my art downtown, my husband, my son, certain friends, old teachers, … where does the list end?
But when I’m really deep into what I’m doing, I don’t care about impressing anyone.
a/b: Thank you.
One of aging’s consolations is indeed a sense of what I can do now (especially with writing) that I could barely imagine 20-30 years ago. The catch, of course, is that I wish I had that younger self’s energy to couple with the current self’s… umm… raw materials, maybe? Maybe the sweet spot between youth’s energy and age’s skill set is sometime around 40, say in the 35- to 45-year-old range.
marta: Couldn’t resist the Joe’s reference.
That time of complete un-self-consciousness is a beautiful state to be in. Very difficult to attain (for me anyhow), but by itself it makes the practice of writing worth all the downsides (again, for me). I’ve seen people on Twitter use a hashtag, #amwriting, which has never made any real sense to me… If I were so self-conscious — while really #amwriting — that I’d stop to tweet about it, then I’d know I was missing the bliss, and maybe (for me!) the whole point.
I could hear myself in Marta’s repsonse…my husband, my children, my mother. But oh my, to impress my older brother has to top the list.
It is a large list that’s true, and it does depend on what I’m doing. Sometimes when I’m being my most quirky or most animated, I seem to impress myself. But then, my ego squirms and I look around for someone to hang my worthiness on. And in the quiet of writing, sometimes I don’t care who (or is that whom?) I write to, as long as I write.