Womanish by Kimberly McLarin

Author:Kimberly McLarin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IG Publishing
Published: 2019-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

On Self-Delusion

The last time I lied to myself was five years ago, when I pretended a man loved me who most certainly did not. By pretended I don’t mean I stalked him from the shadows or play-acted meeting his mother or secretly tattooed his initials to my thigh. I didn’t try to stop myself from raging at his crappy behavior; I made no lame, half-hearted excuses to my friends.

What I did was to simply go on seeing a person who treated my heart like toilet paper, who valued my soul and my very being about as much as he valued Styrofoam. I pretended to be in charge of what was happening. I told myself that even though I wanted more I could accept less and not be compromised, that the excitement and the sex were worth it, at least for a while. I told myself I was not trying to win his love. I told myself I knew I never would.

One big ball of lies, intertwined and interlocked. It took a long time to unravel the ball, to stretch it out and examine from end to end but finally I managed to do so. I have not lied to myself since. Unless, of course, I have. Unless telling myself I do not lie to myself is the biggest lie of all.

In her 1961 essay “On Self-Respect,” Joan Didion suggests that it is easier to fool others than to fool ourselves. “Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions.”

As much as I admire Didion, I’m afraid I must disagree. It seems to me that most of us live our lives in a state of self-deception, a state the size of Texas and California combined. Some people patrol the borders of their states, eyeing the fence and perhaps occasionally making a run for it. Others never even come close to the border, living instead deep within their homeland, never wondering or wandering.

Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most common of deceptions. We spend our days not so much lying to others as simply trying to get them to swallow what we ourselves have already desperately choked down. Didion, who was only twenty-seven when she wrote “On Self-Respect,” saw this better as she aged;1 that she did not see it earlier is probably not unrelated to her societal position, which is to say: cushioned, privileged, white. (Note the unquestioned beliefs about birthright and Manifest Destiny underlying the essay. Note the purely metaphorical use of “Indians”—the peoples, not the word.)

James Baldwin saw it. “It goes without saying, I believe,” he wrote, “that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one’s knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know!”

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