Brett's Discernment

There are several parts of creative writing which have touched me over the years. One of the most is by this girl who was a senior when I was a freshman in high school, and she was the most eccentric person I had ever met at that point. I interviewed her because she was one of the top 10 . . . I will have to find her essay sometime called "when I am an old woman" or something like that. She could not possibly have any clue that she wrote something that stayed with me for so long. Amazing how that happens.

This is another essay which has stuck with me over the years, introduced to me by my amazing AP English teacher, of which so many of the things she showed me I have reflected upon over these five years. but this may be the most important recently.

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Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusions that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of it's every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambigious (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiosly exempt from the cause-effect relationship which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I must have recognized that the situtation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleaseant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes nonwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that very well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards-the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which invovled no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others-who are, after all, decieved easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

- Joan Didion