The astrology app says I’m “inscrutable.” A coworker tells me I seem “unbothered.” I’m used to being read that way: chill, self-contained, low-maintenance, unbothered. Despite usually taking these perceptions to be fundamental misunderstandings rather than compliments, I use some of those same words to describe myself sometimes.
It is important to maintain a relatively placid appearance, obscuring any personal chaos inside of myself. The only downside is this: the more chaos I encounter within, the more I feel the need to withdraw.
My real-life social life is totally dead and my only active social media presence currently is on a secret blog. I spend my free time there happily, anonymous and gushing, in self-imposed exile from the World of Other People.
The beauty of solitude lies mostly in its chosen-ness, so I have justified my aloneness to myself in certain ways. I am better off alone until I’ve published a “real” book, have landed a “real” job, am able to present as my “real” self and behave like a “real” (read: not anxious) person. Why should anyone concern themselves with knowing me before I’ve filled out my metaphorical résumé with sufficiently respectable attributes? Until then, become unreadable, unnoticed, unknown. It seemed a noble plan.
One of my favorite passages from Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely depicts loneliness and guilt through the gesture of the apology:
In my dream I apologize to everyone I meet. Instead of introducing myself, I apologize for not knowing why I am alive. I am sorry. I am sorry. I apologize. In real life, oddly enough, when I am fully awake and out and about, if I catch someone’s eye, I quickly look away. Perhaps this too is a form of apology. Perhaps this is the form apologies take in real life.
Self-obscuration is certainly a means of apologizing for the self, but it is not rooted completely in personal insecurity or shame.
Consider these actions in the context of double consciousness. Coined by W.E.B. DuBois in 1903, the term refers to “a source of inward ‘twoness’ putatively experienced by African-Americans because of their racialized oppression and disvaluation in a white-dominated society.”1 In common usage, double consciousness describes the ongoing experience of “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”
In a society that has continuously proven that the mere fact of Blackness is punishable by scrutiny and mistrust, if not death, this sort of silent apologizing can also exemplify preemptive self-protection.
The passage from Don’t Let Me Be Lonely concludes with a sort of appeal:
Afterwards, after I have looked away, I never feel as if I can say, Look, look at me again so that I can see you, so that I can acknowledge that I have seen you, so that I can see you and apologize.
While I do mean to apply double consciousness according to its original racialized definition, I also want to draw on its purely social usage. In any given interaction, one must consider the reactions and opinions of the Other. The speaker of Rankine’s piece is obviously self-conscious, but becomes retroactively conscious of the Other’s needs.
I am particularly struck by the invocation of the idea of acknowledgement. In a selfless (pun somewhat intended) effort to apologize and conceal the self, the speaker ends up doing the Other a disservice: depriving them of the deserved acknowledgement.
Interpreted this way, loneliness and shame are not only harmful to the lonely and shamed self but to others in the social world. By forgoing the social role of willfully seeing and being seen, the self infects the Other with the painful disease of invisibility.
After reflecting on my own experiences under this lens, I wonder whether I have really relieved anyone of the burden of me, or if I’ve neglected my human duty to notice and perceive and engage with other humans.
At the same time, though, an apology for my very existence often seems necessary. Over the past couple of years, my androgyny has exited the realm of fantasies and become a fact. Strangers perceive me as being either definitely male or definitely female, but to my dismay, rarely as neither or both. I commonly receive corrections and apologies during these interactions after these strangers decide for themselves that they’ve made a mistake in perceiving my gender and frantically switch to the other side of the binary.
That my appearance has become as much of an oddity as my personality always has been makes it just that much more difficult to be present in social situations. Like Rankine’s speaker, I silently apologize to everyone I meet. I am sorry for embodying something you do not understand. I am sorry you had to see me and feel confused. I am sorry for taking up any space or time.
As is typical for me, I am trying to think through this conundrum with the help of literature and poetry. Surely I would not be a poet if I truly wanted to live forever exempt from the World of Other People. It’s even antithetical to my understanding of myself. I have always loved people, despite struggling for as long as I can remember to connect with them meaningfully and “correctly.”
People are reflected in each other and in literature and in life. Maybe my love for ambiguous, bewildering poems is not so different from my desire to be perceived as a generally fluid and multifaceted being.
James Baldwin once said “It is not my fault that I write,” which stands in opposition to Claudia Rankine’s “I apologize for not knowing why I am alive” without totally contradicting it. The only difference is how these speakers respond to ambiguity, or the aspects of life that merely are.
It is not my fault that I am alive, so why should any byproduct of my living— my gender, my selfhood, my writing, my circumstance, etc.— require apologies and shame? Why do I need to present a respectability résumé in order to feel like my existence warrants anyone else’s genuine concern?
“Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” by Elizabeth Alexander has offered me a great deal of comfort since I first read it a few weeks ago. Here are the last few stanzas:
Poetry (and now my voice is rising) is not all love, love, love, and I’m sorry the dog died. Poetry (here I hear myself loudest) is the human voice, and are we not of interest to each other?
The speaker of another poem in Don’t Let Me Be Lonely echoes a very similar sentiment by asking “Why are we here if not for each other?”
Now that I realize that they are the same thing, it feels foolish to say I have an easier time in the World of Poems than in the World of Other People. Poetry is of interest to me just as humanity is of interest to me. There is no way to separate the two.
I can accept that I am lonely without asserting that I am better off alone. As shameful and anxiety-inducing as it is to be seen publicly wanting, here I am, saying it as earnestly as I can.
I will undo this period of self-exile. I will assert my need for patience and compassion as I challenge certain negative beliefs about myself. I will take the necessary time to build trust. I will pour into others as much as they’ll allow me to.
Most importantly, I will remain conscious of my ability to acknowledge. After all, why am I here if not for you?
definition courtesy of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy