By Ava Fritz
Once, I had a fumbling interaction with some guys. Later that night in my room, I was so haunted by the event that I was unable to focus on my work. Instead I chose to record my thoughts onto a document as I so often do: “Why, God, why am I like this”. I reread my words now and recall my desperate embarrassment with a sour kind of amusement, and in my most privileged, rational state, as our future selves often are, I can question my humiliation and wonder why such petty little things can drive me down a rabbit hole of anxious thought. I have come to the conclusion that it was the result of misplaced self-respect, encouraged by what I call “the conditions”.
That day I had asked what time it was, and my friend flashed his phone at me in response. In that moment for whatever reason, I thought he was insinuating that I listen to the song on his screen. I said, “I’ll listen to it,” after a beat of silence where he and his friend stared at me, he said slowly, “That, uh, wasn’t what I was saying. I was showing you the time.” Filled with horror, I smiled, “I’ll listen to it anyway!” With a pained grin, I walked backwards out the door, where I then bumped into someone, since I was, afterall, walking backwards. The door slammed behind me with a resounding BANG! and I thought about that moment almost every night for the next week. The fact is I may not have done anything wrong, but I melodramatically considered that moment the end of all ends, the pinnacle of my human existence, summarized as shameful, petty, and embarrassing. It mattered little those other victories, the smoothly delivered joke in class, the newly acquired friend; all that mattered was my one fumble. As ludicrous as it sounds to you and me now, it happens rather often. That is, the pinning of my entire self worth to the smallest mistakes and missteps. I don’t give myself the luxury, however, of calling myself the singular martyr of this phenomenon, because I have found that many others are also afflicted by this oddly manifested, misplaced self-respect.
I have heard such horror stories from my friends of how they could not throw a tissue out in the middle of a test, a heavy anxiety rolling over them at the idea of disturbing other students on the way over to the trash bin. Messages about the heated embarrassment that comes with having to make a phone call to a company by yourself have made my Instagram feed in the form of viral text posts many times over. This kind of crippling social anxiety has become, in a word, a meme, as well as a sort of accepted marker of my generation.
Whether or not one claims these handicaps does not necessarily determine who actually possesses them, nor how they vary in severity from person to person. There are those who reject the idea of their own anxieties with such vehemence that they take it out on others who actually accept it in the form of hate messages or jeering via 1s and 0s; “ur just sensitive, kys”, and other classy messages. There are also those who seem to revel in this world of minimal social functioning, fully accepting and flaunting their status to the point where it almost comes across as pride, as if being a victim to it has become some kind of badge of individuality. “i’m rlly depressed & suffer from anxiety :(( let’s be friends!” It’s become comical to many, I even find myself laughing at both kinds of people. However, the fact that they exist in the first place does plant a small seed of concern in the back of my mind, because in truth, watered down or not, we’ve all been one of them at some point.
“It’s not that deep”. I can hear that line in my head, but I also can’t help but think it’d be a miracle if anything wasn’t that deep. I beg to argue that there is always somehow an explanation that goes back farther, and that nothing so easily stops in the shallow end. Some say this is nothing new, that this sort of anxiety of our generation is simply a marker of youth. While I agree to an extent, especially considering my own youth, I can’t say that this generation isn’t an anomaly. With suicide rates on a steep incline since 1999 and depressive disorders sprouting up in even the brightest corners, I would think that some reflection is due. If we don’t ever take a moment to consider it, forever passing it off as the usual teenage unrest, we might end up with a full generation of adults with this flavor of intense anxiety, and if that doesn’t frighten you, I don’t know what will.
I believe our generation has developed a hyper-sensitive awareness of self-image to the point where spending late nights agonizing over insignificant mistakes has become a hat-tipping norm. We hold ourselves to unmatchable standards, expecting that if we are worth any kind of respect, self or otherwise, perfection should come to us as easily as habit. We are disconnecting from the reality of what we are actually capable of doing.
This convoluted idea of self-respect has come from what I call “the conditions”. Every generation, every decade, every person has their own conditions, their own context in which they have to cope. For our generation, we were dealt a very distinctive hand. We have been born into a world that distorts the true nature of who we are with our newfound ability to put on increasingly inimitable social masks, and the resulting build-up of unreleased social tension is manifesting itself in our very delicate anxieties, hidden or out in the open as they are.
One of the major conditions of our generation is the digital age and the imperamance that comes with it. A comment can always be deleted, a video taken down, our browsers erased. There is the illusion that every action you take can all just blink out of existence. We’ve begun to think we can be perfect, because every misplaced footstep we take can be ‘erased’.
There is a sense of responsibility to who you are that comes with permanence that we seem to be slowly losing as we grow more accustomed to the luxury of the ‘delete’ button.
My mind goes to the obsolescence of pen and paper. In this new world of computers, a single tap can rid of pages upon pages of unwanted work. With the unerasable pen, you have to live with the resulting mistakes, scribbles, and ink blots. In typing, mistakes can be eradicated, and something imperfect can become perfect, however, not necessarily of our own accord. Learning to spell can slowly fade out as spellcheck begins to rule our lives, and basic grammar can be forgotten as Grammarly begins its tyrannical reign. We obsessively use filters and lighting for the perfect photo, the archive button for the perfect feed; the number of followers you attain as a result somehow being equated to your self-worth. However, it’s superficial, and deep down, we all know it.
It has become thrown in our faces, as a generation, again and again how this perfection is a standard, and as a result, our idea of who we are and what is possible to achieve on our own has been slowly blurred and grinded up into little 1s and 0s.
I see this happening and I can’t help but find value in the character of a handwritten paper, each letter one of a kind, there being a sort of charm to the scribble that demonstrates the oh-so human habit of making mistakes.
‘Human mistake’, with this, the key to developing our generation’s idea of self-respect shyly presents itself, the acceptance and embrace of mistake.
It sounds so simple, but somehow it’s so difficult. However, I am certain this is the way to cope with these given “conditions”. Reject the anxiety that comes with the simple things in life, like asking for help or reaching out to others, because the odds are you will screw up no matter what but that, right there, is the point of being human. It is the imperfections that make us, not the perfect Instagram feed, not the tough mask you use to reply to people on the internet. This persona of perfection that we so intensely crave whether openly or internally is not what really makes us who we are. Perfection is unattainable, so to agonize over being anything but is simply a waste of time.
We are good enough because we could never be that good.
Self-respect is spending all that energy we usually waste on obsessing over what we lack, instead on self improvement and becoming someone imperfect we can actually like. For how can we like ourselves if we know that everything we do is for show, that it’s all just one big hoax for the sake of appearances?
We cannot fool ourselves the way we can fool others, so the ultimate solution is to not fool ourselves at all.
