I love it when I find a resonance between stuff I’m thinking about and the larger world. This is probably like when you slam into a super-coincidence: you run into somebody you know from Italy on the F train in New York, for instance, and you think: holy shit, what are the odds? You don’t usually think about all the even more fantastically coincidental encounters that almost happen, but don’t. All those people you met in Malaysia who are one car down from you on the train, and whom you never see.
Anyway, as you may remember, I’ve been trying to come to terms with the various ways I’m profoundly fucked up. One of these is perfectionism, and in the course of learning about this I’ve got some real aha! moments, particularly regarding self-sabotage. The idea is this: something is really important to you, perhaps so important that you’ve wrapped a bunch of your identity up in it. You think to yourself: I am the smartest guy around, or the best basketball player, or the guy who knows the most about Italian history. But then, when reality presents an opportunity where you might be judged on this criterion you’ve defined, you have only one option to avoid having your idiotic narrative derailed: sabotage. You purposefully fuck up, so that instead of having to come face to face with the fact that you are not, in fact, the smartest guy around, you instead say: I was sick that day; or I was out partying till 4 AM the night before; or: the teacher was an idiot and I didn’t feel like putting up with her shit.
When I read about this my jaw just about dropped. Some of the examples in some of the books were things I myself had done, _exactly_. As if somebody had been following me around and writing down all the ways in which I was retarded, and then published a book on it. Which was also a revelation of another kind: no matter how unique you think you are, you’re really not all that unique.
Anyway, with that in mind, this first paragraph from this article blew me away, both because it’s such a hard hook and because, now that I’ve been thinking about this defense mechanism, seeing it narrated in the wild is such a rush:
On the bus ride down to St. Paul to take the test that will help determine who will get ahead in life, who will stay put, and who will fall behind, two of my closest buddies seal their fates by opening pint bottles of cherry schnapps the moment we leave the high school parking lot. They hide the liquor under their varsity jackets and monitor the driver’s rearview mirror for opportune moments to duck their heads and swig. A girl sees what they’re up to, mutters, “Morons,” and goes back to shading in the tiny ovals in her Scholastic Aptitude Test review book. She dated one of the guys a few months back, but lately she’s grown serious, ambitious; I’ve heard that she hopes to practice law someday and prosecute companies that pollute the air. When she notices one of the bottles coming my way, she shoots me a look of horror.
“No, thanks,” I say.
My friends seem wounded by this—aren’t we teammates? We play baseball and football together. We go way back. In our high school class there are only fifteen boys, and every summer some of us camp out by the river and cannonball from the cliffs into the current. We talk as though we’ll be together forever, though I’ve always known better: Someday we’ll be ranked. Someday we’ll be screened and then separated. I’ve known this since my first day of kindergarten, when I raised my hand slightly faster than the other kids—and waved it around to make sure the teacher saw it.
My buddies give me another chance to drink.
“Put that away, guys. Today is a big deal for us.”
But they know this already—they just don’t like the fact.
“Come on,” one says. “A sip.”
“I’m sorry. No.”
And so I go on to college, and they don’t.
I literally stopped reading to right this post. Now I’m going to read the rest of the article, which I’m sure will be amazing.