Editorials featured in the Forum section are solely the opinions of their individual authors.
There is one thing that I will always hate: confronting my awkward nature. This is something I had to do last weekend when I took a trip to Caliban Book Shop. After browsing through the adorably cramped and cluttered shop, I brought a copy of the book “Crowds and Power” by Elias Canetti to the cash register where an obviously cool bookseller helped check me out. You know the type — the sort of dude who collects records, drinks french-press coffee, and has a St. Bernard named Beethoven. The Cool Bookseller recognized the book immediately and had many things to say about it. He cited a few stand out chapters. At that moment, I knew that like a socially-awkward Icarus, I had flown too close to the sun of being comfortable in my own skin. All I could do was stand there and take in the fact that the book I had chosen was cool. Too cool. What does one do when they find themselves face to face with the embodiment of self-actualized freshness? Reply awkwardly with something along the lines of “…yeah. It had a pretty cool cover… looked important…” That was not the cool thing to say. And the Cool Bookseller knew it. I cringed the rest of the way home.
There is a large gap between the person I am and the way I want to be seen by others. I recognize and accept that. The person I want to be: The type of girl who reads Murakami, the type of girl people write songs about, the type of person dogs run up to greet on the sidewalk. Compared to the person I am: Someone who turns in library books 70 days past due, the type of person who knows four (this number is debatable) guitar chords, a girl whose backpack gets pissed on by poodles when she’s not looking. The persona we seek to embody is not always the one we end up putting out into the world. And that is fine. I don’t choose to think about this as a symptom of some sort of underlying shame or denial we carry around ourselves. If anything, striving to portray this ideal persona is almost like a form of social insurance while waiting to be rescued by literally anyone from the limbo of social obscurity. Waiting for someone to see you and decide that they want to know you. In the meantime, the more closely you embody the package you want to sell yourself as to the world, the closer you find yourself surrounded by people who believe you to be the person you want to be.
Personality posturing is what I refer to when talking about the ways we work to embody and communicate specific traits visually that people usually will only have the opportunity to discover through conversation and direct interaction. The first episode of John Wilson’s HBO series “How To with John Wilson” is titled “How To Make Small Talk”. In this episode, Wilson explores the ways we interact with the people around us, and ways we can trick people into wanting to interact with us. One way Wilson does this is by going to a Red Hot Chili Peppers cover band concert called “The Red Hot Chili Pipers,” buying a t-shirt of the cover band, and going to a nearby hotel and riding up and down the building’s elevator until people interact with him by commenting on his strange t-shirt. While in day-to-day life we don’t go to the extremes of riding up and down hotel elevators in strange t-shirts hoping that it will spark a conversation, we typically posture our interests through the band-tees we wear and the media referenced on our tote-bags. Every time I put my Talking Heads t-shirt on there is a part of me that hopes that it will somehow spark a conversation with a stranger in line while waiting for coffee.
We care so much about how we package and decorate ourselves because in this day and age, who actually approaches strangers anymore? People need people more than we realize and to posture our personality for others to see is a service to not only ourselves, but also to others. To quote the opening line of the book I bought from the Cool Bookseller at Caliban Book Shop: “There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it.” People are scared of each other. We view the world in terms of threat and risk — that’s why when we see someone wearing a piece of merchandise or a shirt with an obscure pop-culture reference this serves as a social-olive-branch of familiarity.
Social media adds another dimension to how posturing can exist. How do we post? What songs do we put on our instagram stories? How do we want to be perceived through our online presence? How do we text? Bitmoji? Gifs? It never ends. We are in a constant state of performance. If gender is a performed social construct, then so is your Mac Demarco t-shirt.
No matter how fun it can be to project your personality with the world, posturing is not a sustainable solution. It can be exhausting to be living with other people at the back of your mind at all times. To wonder how people who don’t even know you receive and perceive you. We want to present an ideal of ourselves and it’s unrealistic to imagine that it’s possible to let people know us without going through the labor of discovering who you are for themselves. Only through making an effort to connect with the people around us are we able to fully understand and appreciate each other. I don’t need Cool Bookseller’s approval to know that deep down I am a Cool Customer.
Leave a Reply