I want to think for a few minutes about a truism of sorts that I recently noticed, something that maybe you consider old news but that’s nevertheless interesting to me right now.

I was rereading some old entries from my personal blog that used to be at this URL. Public utterances — at least in intent, even if nobody was actually reading them. As I read these entries from a year or more ago, it struck me that every little story I told about myself, every remark and observation, was calculated in some way to reflect well on me, to make myself look good.

Making oneself look good is a key feature of human speech, it seems. Think about it. When was the last time you told a story to make yourself look bad, or said something with the intent of coming off as a prick or a bore? We only act obnoxiously on purpose as a joke (playing a comedic role). We only relate embarrassing stories about ourselves for laughs or sympathy, and we choose and shape these stories carefully.

(I can easily tell the story of how, at the age of 12 or so, I got sick while singing in a large choir at church, vomited in front of hundreds of congregants, and had to walk up one of the long main aisles to get out of the chapel to the bathroom. But I have many, much more embarrassing stories that I don’t tell about myself because in those stories I am deceitful, emotionally manipulative, painfully needy, etc.)

I don’t think I’m at all unique in this. We all try to make ourselves look good. Do we do it all the time, or are there times when we let up on the self-promotion? I don’t know. I feel on surer ground with the claim that, even if we’re not always trying to make ourselves look good, at least we always (or very close to always) are guarding against allowing ourselves to look bad. (I don’t have room here to explore what “good” and “bad” mean in this context, though obviously that is a rewarding question in its own right.) Or let me put it this way: Of the projects we’re engaged in day after day, one of the most constant, however hidden, is the project of keeping up appearances.

As something we all do (almost) all the time, keeping from making ourselves look bad is not an activity to be condemned. I just want to think about a few of its consequences.

Another commonplace observation: While we all try not to make ourselves look bad, we all end up in fact looking bad, even being the cause of our own looking bad, with some regularity. I once had a roommate who wouldn’t stop talking but never said anything interesting — rarely even managed to tell a coherent story, in fact, because the normal structure of conversation got swept away in the flood of words. She made herself look bad just by talking, although she didn’t mean to. Or take this anecdote I related on that old blog of mine, about crossing the street in front of the Washington Monument:

Anyway, I was standing at a crosswalk waiting for the light to turn and this big SUV pulls up behind me. ON THE SIDEWALK behind me. I figured I could move out of the way, but I was a pedestrian and it was a SIDEWALK.

So I was being a little self-righteous. A bit of a prick. I’m like that as a pedestrian sometimes. I don’t own a car because I’m poor, not because I’m committed to fighting global warming or anything. But I’m still self-righteous about it.

Anyway, the guy in the SUV honked at me. I turned briefly, barely acknowledging his existence. Then I pointed at the sidewalk and yelled “It’s a sidewalk” before turning back to face the red hand across the street and wait for the light to change.

So the guy pulls back a bit and pulls up to the left of me so he can go over the curb and onto the street and not wait for me to move from my spot at a cut in the curb. (And isn’t that what SUVs are built for, anyway — going over curbs?) And as he pulls up even with me, he rolls down his passenger window and yells “You didn’t have to be an asshole.” Which was true. And I yelled “It’s a SIDEWALK,” which was also true. And he yells “Fuck off!” before driving off.

I crossed the street and kept thinking of things I should have said to him. “It’s bad enough that you drive that SUV on the roads — now you’re trying to take the sidewalks, too?” I started thinking how he was probably from the Virginia suburbs (I have this irrational belief that all the bad people around here live in the Virginia suburbs) and is probably a Republican (again, an irrational notion). Being angry didn’t make me feel any better, but I didn’t want to stop being angry. A nasty malaise settled over me that I haven’t yet shaken.

The title of this post was “Who’s the asshole?” And reading it now, I can only answer, “I was.” But at the time, I was pissed off at the driver. He had really offended some misplaced notion of pedestrians’ rights I was nursing at the time. I was also troubled, though, that I might have been in the wrong — “So I was being a little self-righteous. A bit of a prick.” Still, overall, I thought the story, or at least my discussion of it, made me come off looking good, so I posted it and inadvertently revealed myself to be, well, a self-righteous prick.

Sometimes, then, we fail to prevent ourselves from looking bad through lack of skill — we don’t realize our roommates think we’re prattling mindlessly, or our readers conclude that we are assholes. It seems that another circumstance in which we aren’t engaged in not letting ourselves look bad is when we’re in the throes of an intense emotion. When you’re angry, for example, your actions are so beholden to that anger that you have little attention or skill left for the task of keeping up appearances. Maybe other emotions, too, can have this effect. Fear, certainly. (I’ve been talked into trying rappelling several times, and each time, dangling by a rope off the side of a cliff, I was so seized with fear that I lost all concern for how ridiculous my fear made me look.)

Because “making oneself look good” or “not letting oneself look bad” are concerned with how one looks, with appearances, they are immediately activities that involve the creation of illusions. It doesn’t matter if you are indeed a jerk, or even if you feel like a jerk, as long as you create the impression that you are not a jerk. Should we go so far as to say there is a degree of mendacity here? Certainly, recognizing that self-promotion, keeping up appearances, is an important item on each person’s roster of motivations gives us reason to be suspicious of the things people say, the stories and histories they rehearse.

I say “it doesn’t matter … even if you feel like a jerk,” but in fact that’s something that matters to us a great deal. We ourselves are among the most important audiences for the illusions we create about ourselves. And since we know ourselves quite well, we are often very good at constructing these self-directed deceptions. So we have to be suspicious of our own stories, too. (One thing we hide from ourselves, I would say, is this whole enterprise of keeping up appearances. Something about the project seems unsavory, a bit shameful.)

If we sometimes allow ourselves to look bad through inadvertence, and sometimes because we’re so distracted by an intense emotion that we can’t pay attention to how we appear, the question remains whether we can ever consciously consciously let down our guard and stop what Adam Phillips, a psychoanalytic writer I admire, calls “a kind of anxious vigilance” about our words and actions. This is hard. Anxious vigilance is a matter of degree, I think, and we’re less guarded in intimate conversations with people close to us. But even then we’re careful to a degree. Is it a benefit of psychotherapy or the close confessional relationship that I’ve heard described in the Catholic Church that you have an opportunity to allow yourself to look bad, that it is even encouraged? That is a powerful kind of permission.

The activity of watching oneself to guard against looking bad implies a kind of doubleness or division — a part of oneself stands outside oneself, first observing and then editing and censoring. Maybe something to be said for dropping this activity, at least from time to time, is that dropping it allows us a certain amount of integration.

Maybe the possibility of dropping the activity of keeping up appeearances completely is doubtful. I’ve suggested a few circumstances in which we can let down our guard and stop trying to shape how we appear to others, but I’m not fully convinced. Phillips, in an essay called “On Being Laughed At,” writes about ridicule and its avoidance; avoiding ridicule is at least part of what I’m talking about here. “When we laugh at someone else,” Phillips writes, “we violate, or simply disregard, their preferred image of themselves.”

To be mocked, in other words, is the narcissist’s nightmare (which is why narcissists like us can be so good at it) and why all children go through at least a period of dreading it…. So I want to ask, as a kind of utopian thought-experiment: what would have to happen for someone to grow out of the fear of being laughed at?

Like I said, I’m not suggesting that we should stop guarding against looking bad. I certainly don’t expect that it would even be possible in most circumstances to let down our guard: Most of the social interactions demanded by our various projects of living don’t afford nearly enough safety to allow us to quit caring about how we appear to others. But it’s an interesting thought, isn’t it, and appealing, in a utopian way.

Returning to my blog entry about the encounter with the SUV: When I gave it the title “Who’s the asshole?” I was partly thinking about irony: that the SUV guy was the asshole, although he had called me an asshole. But a part of me was aware that I didn’t come off looking very good in the story, and that the title was at least ambiguous, kind of an open question really, and despite that I hit the “publish” button on that post. I believe we can show at least some parts of ourselves that we’d rather keep hidden, at least fitfully, in half-measures. And that may be enough, at least for starters.