My social media friends have advised me that, in order to be a successful writer I must glow with self-confidence, yet maintain the appearance of monkish humility.
This confuses me. But over the years I have noticed a lot of actresses and writers who carry themselves with an imperial bearing, yet are constantly trumpeting their humility to the world. The more awards they receive and the more effusive the praise, the lower their opinion of themselves seems to get.
This is also true of non-famous writers. I was doing research on query letters and a woman who had written a letter and gotten a positive response from an agent said that she was “deeply humbled,\” even though she was not even published yet.
What is going on? Maybe I am silly to take these kinds of statements literally but since I have been told that achieving a proper “balance” is vital to my literary career, I need to understand.
My thought when I hear these kinds of statements is, “I do not believe you,” or “If praise is diminishing your self-esteem, then your emotional wiring is faulty.” But I have to wonder if I am only skeptical because I lack the virtue that these successful professionals possess in such profusion.
When I receive praise, my experience is different. My mood soars. During that moment I feel anything but humble. My opinion of myself does not diminish with accolades. On the contrary, it temporarily rises, sometimes toward the point of grandiosity. Usually it snaps back into place by morning.
But sometimes not.
I wonder: Is there something wrong with me? Should praise be lowering my self-esteem instead of elevating it? Why do I seem to lack the vital professional virtue that so many successful writers have?
Are they lying?
In that case I wonder: Is there something wrong with being proud of accomplishments you have worked hard to achieve so that you must: A) hide it from the world or B) claim that the opposite is true?
Maybe it all comes down to not being rude or making anyone jealous. A close relative once told me, “Your writing is good, but don’t let it go to your head. I can say it, but I don’t want to ever hear you say it. As soon as you start to know it, I will stop saying it.” To be clear, this statement was not prompted by bragging.
It was a warning, maybe said partly in jest, but it illustrates why I am confused about social messages regarding how people should or should not feel about themselves.
The social rule against “knowing” if I am successful presents a problem for me. A big motivator for me to succeed, whether in grades or writing, has always been imagining how proud of myself I would feel if I accomplished my goals. It has never been the only motivator, but during times when things got difficult, it was my ego that ultimately stepped in and carried me to the end. What fun is it to struggle and work hard to be good at something if I am not allowed to ever know it?
True, some people who brag constantly, take no interest in others, and only talk about themselves can be tedious company. But I wonder if that is a real sign of people liking themselves, or only of a need to bolster themselves from a position of insecurity.
If so, is the solution for that a need to like themselves less?
To complicate everything, people are constantly told that they need confidence if they want to succeed in a competitive job market. In an interview situation, applicants are supposed to say only good things about themselves, to make a strong impression: “I am active, driven, hard-working, and a team player.”
Weaknesses should be under-emphasized and admitted only to convey to the employer “positive” traits such as, “Sometimes I am just too focused on my work; I become so driven I forget to stop and smell the roses,” or “I am a terrible perfectionist.”
In a competitive marketplace, most seem to agree that people need confidence to succeed. Books are written on how to have more of it. Some parents tell children, “If you don’t like yourself, no one else will either” and they discourage children from being shy. I was told, \”If you have something you want to say, speak up. Show that you think a lot of yourself.”
So which is it? I cannot be supremely confident and supremely humble both. Where is this “balance” I have been told that I need? And is it something that can be achieved honestly or can it only be feigned?
As usual, I have had to go inside my head to find an answer. What I remember is a time during my childhood when I disliked myself. I had been bullied relentlessly, and I was chronically confused about what made people like other people.
One day when I was 15 years old, I made a decision: I was going to like myself unconditionally, whether anyone else did or not. I studied and made high grades, and my accomplishments supported my belief in myself. My decision turned out to be a good one.
I was able to compare, side by side, how it felt to not like myself and how it felt to like myself. By far, I preferred the latter. If I am going spend 24 hours a day with myself, my whole life, and never get a break, it is a good thing if I enjoy my company.
Since then, I have disliked the word \”humility.\” It seemed to mean that I should push my opinion of myself back down to where it was before my adolescent resolution.
Plus, the word at my strict religious school meant making yourself small and helpless in order to please God, a way to say, “I am nothing. I deserve nothing.” After I became agnostic, this kind of humility seemed not virtuous, but masochistic.
I had a religious grandmother who was devoutly humble. Once when she visited, she was deciding which peach to take from a bowl on the dining counter. She withdrew the sickliest-looking peach, worm-ravaged, scrawny, and bruised. “This peach doesn’t look so good,” she frowned. “I guess I’ll take this one.”
Even when I was a believer, her reasoning seemed strange to me. But if I am going to reject the whole idea of humility, maybe I need a more thorough understanding of what it really is.
There is a sense in which the word humility is used that makes me want to like the word. An example is the humility of a scientist who is willing to accept the findings of an experiment, even if it means admitting his favorite hypothesis is wrong. Or a willingness to put away the comfort of false “certainty” and allow unanswered questions to exist rather than trying to force answers.
The universe is always presenting new challenges to human self-importance, such as the inconceivable number of “suns” in the universe or the evidence that human existence is not the center of everything as was once thought.
But the kind of humility I was taught to believe in has little to do with the kind I just described. And, from what I have observed, the kinds of people who practice one are not the same kinds of people who practice the other.
But how does any of this apply to writers? Maybe humility is what Pulitzer Prize winner Jon Franklin described as his epiphany that he was not “special.” By this he meant, not that he was not unique or that he did not matter, but that uniqueness is not unique, and that his point of view was not the only one that was compelling.
Sometimes when I write I have a sense that this is true. It is not a low self-esteem. I still like myself.
But I become aware that I am only one writer, and that I will never be able to encompass the whole of human experience. Every one of my readers know and have experienced things I never will. The world is full of people, billions of them, from varied backgrounds. But anything I write is from only one perspective; my point of view really is only a point.
But a reader with a drastically different background from my own is sometimes able to read my blog and find something in it that they can relate to. This astounds me. And because my knowledge and experience are so limited, I find myself far more impressed with the power of language than I am with my skill.
Whenever this happens I am sometimes tempted to reach for that word: humility. But I always hold back.
And I think: That word is awful. I wish there was a better one.