This Is How (8 page)

O
NE OF THE ADVANTAGES
of being superior in age to an ordinary twenty-year-old is that I was able to watch the TV movie
Sybil
upon its original broadcast in 1976. For those of you who were deprived of life in this era,
Sybil
starred Sally “My mama always said, life is like” Field as an emotionally troubled girl with multiple personality disorder.

Which meant she could be a hooker one minute and Girl Scout the next and neither one would even know the other existed.

After this movie, everybody suddenly worried they might also be a multiple. How else to explain that pair of two-hundred-dollar shoes you almost don’t even remember buying?

Then, meanly, psychiatrists began saying that there was no such disorder. Or, if there was, it was exceedingly rare.

Of course, today we are more evolved and less gluttonous with our psychiatric labels. We know fully well that
dual
personality disorder is indeed a very real thing. After all, anyone who has ever been on a job interview has experienced it for themselves.

You, the rational and reasonable person who is so excellent under pressure could not possibly be the same person who, during the most important job interview of your life, spent the entire interview counting the ceiling tiles behind your potential boss’s head.

How absurd to think that was you who momentarily forgot the name of the company at which you were applying for a job.

It’s as if there are two of you. The you that you are every day, day after day all your life.

And then the you that you become when you go on a job interview.

My job interview personality also comes out when I am in a store, shopping. I do not shoplift. However, I absolutely appear to others, especially store security personnel, as somebody who does.

Even friends have commented on how weird and guilty and sneaky I look from the moment I walk into a Target.

I am so overly aware of not wanting to be seen as a criminal that I totally come across like one.

It’s not such a huge deal when this happens at 7-Eleven. It’s pretty huge, though, when you spend the entire job interview trying not to come across like a box of hair and you come across like a box of hair.

As with so many problems, the solution is sitting right in the center of the problem and if you squint you can see it.

“. . . trying not to come across like a . . .”

That’s the problem.

When you
try
to do or be something, you can’t do it or be it.

Because trying is not the same as being. Trying flies in a circle around the moment and
being
is inside of it.

You must be.

You will either do so convincingly and well, or you won’t. But at least you will be plugged in to the moment in the process. Not flitting just outside of it, trying to keep everything together like one of those little heel-snapping Sheltie dogs.

Many people get this distinction and want to be in the moment, not hovering somewhere above it. The thing is, how?

By engaging with the person you’re with. Which means, not thinking while they’re speaking and not forming your answer as they are in the middle of asking the question.

Engaging with the person means following carefully what they say, going for the full ride of their dialogue. So that you don’t skip over a nuance by mistake.

This is what’ll keep you from zoning out, avoiding eye contact, looking at the wall like a freak, or sweating too much.

During an interview, candor and transparency matter almost more than sheer ability. Skills can be learned, but if somebody is shifty, there you go. They’re shifty and can’t be trusted, period.

Most everybody is nervous during a job interview. And for the person conducting the interview, it’s frustrating because you just wish you could meet the person who would be coming to work every day instead of the job-interview-version of this person, on their best job-interview behavior.

If you had the job, how would you behave?

If the pressure was off, what would you say?

To have or not have the job; high pressure, no pressure: these have nothing to do with sitting in a room across from somebody else in that instant. Getting the job or not getting the job is a conclusion; it comes later. It’s outside the moment.

The truth is:
You are only the person you actually are; you may not
may not
be the person they actually want.

If you’re sitting there thinking, “God, I must look so stupid compared to the other people she’s interviewing,” you have not reached the truth of what’s on your mind.

Thoughts like these are judgments, yes. And they’re also beside the point. Forget whether it’s “negative” thinking or “a tape” in your mind; it’s a fucking daydream. It’s not in the room; it’s in your head.

Stay in the room. Stay in the instant. Say what you think. But don’t let yourself stray from where you are and what you’re doing.

If you’re a stand-up comic and your rent is due so you need the audience to think you’re funny, how do you make them think you’re funny?

Do you tell them about the seven shows in L.A. that you recently sold out? Maybe read some of the amazing reviews you received?

Or do you tell them a joke and make them laugh?

Because if you actually
are
funny, this would work.

So if you think the job really suits you,
be you
.

When you say, “I need more confidence,” what you’re really saying is, “I need those people over there to approve of me.”

That is the desire to control other people and what they think. The first person who figures out how to do this owns the world.

F
EELINGS ARE PRETTY MUCH
like everything else in our culture: they go in and out of fashion.

In 1983, guys wore shirts with Nehru collars and moussed and blow-dried their hair into a kind of manly bouffant; and they did not say, “I guess I’m just feeling really vulnerable right now.”

Vulnerable was not a fashionable thing to be.

That’s why everyone wore mirrored shades.

Today, vulnerability is the very height of emotional fashion. It is not so difficult to conjure an image in your mind of a twenty-year-old dude with layered, shoulder-length brown hair, a smear of stubble across his chin, and the innate ability to play guitar, squinting his eyes as he turns away in profile, folds his arms against his chest, and says, “I guess I’m just feeling really vulnerable right now.”

Not so easy to imagine is this same guy saying, “I’m really struggling with shame.”

Shame is the
Doris
of emotions. It is so out of style that there isn’t even any irony in it.

Typically, when something has been dismissed from popularity and sits ignored in the dark past, all that has to happen is rediscovery by a celebrity and whatever it was—hair ornament, make of car, baby name, yoga—is suddenly
it
all over again.

That has not worked for shame.

Because every time a famous person uses the word, it’s always in the same sentence: “I have brought shame to my family.”

Yet another public relations issue is the somewhat religious overtones the word suggests. This may be partly attributed to the fact that the word
shame
, in one variation or another, appears 235 times in the King James Bible.

It just doesn’t seem likely that shame will be the next
cupcakes
. It may be destined to remain terminally uncool, relegated forever to a distant corner of the past we’d rather forget, right there along with clogs.

I have a hunch that this is one big, fat reason why so many people are so fucked up.

And end up spending so much money on psychotherapy, self-help books, and motivational training courses all in search of the ever-elusive
confidence.

And I told you what the deal is there.

There’s just one catch to what I told you: some people find it difficult—or impossible—to focus on what they’re doing instead of the people watching. Some people struggle and cannot
seem to let go of other people’s opinions of them, whether real or imagined. That means they’re not able to be themselves. Which means other people won’t see them as confident.

This is a
self-esteem issue.

The phrase “self-esteem issue” is a cardboard stage prop of a phrase. What does it even mean?

I guess I have a hard time believing that anything hyphenated could possibly be the deepest truth of the matter.

A lack of “self-esteem” really suggests a feeling of shame over being one’s self.

Shame is the landfill emotion. It’s not organic, like joy. It was dumped there by somebody else.

A manipulation.

Shame is very heavy, dense
disappointment
; somebody else’s, in you.

Inside of disappointment is a deeper judgment: Less than. Inferior. Defective.

See what I was saying before? Shame can lead to a shitload of problems.

Initially, shame is the method adults use to edit children. Shame is a foot that grinds glee into the dirt. It’s very effective to say to a child who has just scribbled with crayons all over the wallpaper, “Boys your age don’t do things like that, how terrible.”

Shame is more coyly deployed by adults in the attempt to modify the thinking or behavior of other adults.

. . .

THE WORD “WHATEVER,” WHEN
accompanied by an eye roll, is what shame looks like when you take away its unstylish acid-wash jeans.

What
ever
may be just one word but it shoulders two different meanings that work together to shame someone.

It is a dismissal.

And the eye roll, whether literal or just implied, is a statement of superiority.

But it’s a clever, effective statement of superiority because it doesn’t come right out and state the position. Rather, the person on the other end of what
ever
concludes it.

If you consider this carefully and honestly, you will notice that if somebody says this word to you, in this way, it makes you feel like a nag, long-winded, tiresome, old, clueless, part of the out group.

Shame is the very height of fashion.

We shame each other at every turn.

And we don’t even need a single word to do it.

Fixing a small, straight smile on your face while looking sideways in front of one person and the knowledge that at least a third person sees you do this is shame. You know the expression I’m talking about, right? If you had to add words to it, they would be “Ohmygod, ohmygod, who
is
this person?”

What this says is, “You are inferior to me. And the person here with us? They know it, too. We both know it. You’re the only one who doesn’t know it.”

Shame exists because remote controls for people don’t. Shame pushes the button and makes the other person change their channel.

Shame is also a covert and effective bullying method. All those bullies from the seventh grade didn’t simply evaporate. They grew up, too, and it’s pretty safe to assume that the majority did not seek therapy on their eighteenth birthday to explore their disturbing childhood need for cruelty.

You can’t, of course, as an adult make fun of somebody every day at work and expect to keep your job.

So bullies use shame because shame comes in so many different varieties.

How satisfying it must be for the modern bully to locate his target at the office and make remarks like, “Jason, dude, how’s it going? Hey man, I’m heading over to the gym at lunch. You know, anytime you want, I would be totally happy to have you come along and I can show you some things you can do, you know, stomach things—make that big boy sit back down flat. Or, a lot of guys, you know, big guys, they get kind of busty. And there’s some simple stuff you can do. I would sincerely be very happy to help you out, if you want. I’m just saying.”

The shame is disguised here as helpful. But both people in this conversation would know it was bullying.

You can train your eye to identify shame by looking for statements or actions that imply a caste system—“It figures you would like that movie,” or disgust—“O
kay
, I think I’ve heard enough about your weekend for one morning.”

As hard as it is sometimes to recognize shaming language and actions when it’s all around you, it’s just as hard to know when shame has landed on you.

And that shit builds up.

Because we’ve been conditioned to accept it since we were kids.

And it happens automatically and fast.

Shame also lives inside your head. It’s the unnamed voice that says to you:

“God, you are such a slob.”

“Look at that fat ass.”

“That girl is totally out of my league.”

”
Yeah, right.
I’m the next Picasso.”

“Maybe I’m supposed to be alone.”

Shame says things like that. When you feel spontaneously excited by something—a new career you never thought about, a haircut you see in a magazine and want—shame is the voice that brings you “back down to earth.”

“I can’t have that haircut. I have too round a face.”

“Except I think you have to be really smart to have that job.”

Shame often goes in drag as common sense. The belittling putdown that shame speaks in your ear often makes sense because you’ve likely heard it since you were a child.

“If you keep eating, you’re going to get fat.”