I’m 38 and I realized last month that I’ve spent my entire adult life trying to be the version of myself that makes other people comfortable — and I genuinely cannot remember what I actually like, because the muscle I built to scan a room for what’s wanted from me has been running for so long that I can’t quite hear my own preferences underneath it
I am thirty-eight and I realized something last month that I have not, on close examination, been able to put down since. The realization arrived in a small specific moment, in the way these realizations tend to, and the moment was almost entirely unremarkable from outside. I was at a dinner with three people I had been wanting to spend more time with. The dinner had been pleasant. The dinner had also, somewhere around the dessert, produced in me the particular kind of low-grade fatigue I have been carrying for as long as I can remember after this kind of social occasion. I had assumed, for most of my adult life, that the fatigue was the natural cost of being a person who participates in dinners. I have, in the last month, started to suspect that this assumption was, in some real way, almost entirely wrong.
What I had actually been doing, at the dinner, was running a muscle I have been running continuously since I was approximately eight years old. The muscle is the one that scans a room for what is wanted from me. The scanning is not, in any conscious sense, deliberate. The scanning is, more accurately, the structural background activity of how my apparatus operates whenever I am in the presence of other people. The scanning identifies, in the first few seconds of any social situation, what the wider environment is implicitly asking me to be. The scanning then calibrates my behavior to provide whatever has been identified. The calibration is small. The calibration is, by long practice, almost entirely outside my conscious awareness. The calibration is, in some real way, just how I show up to other people.
What I realized last month is that the calibration has been running for so long that I can no longer, in any honest sense, locate my own preferences underneath it. The question of what I actually like, when posed to me directly, produces a kind of small internal silence that I had not, until last month, paid particular attention to. The silence is not, on close examination, the absence of preferences. The silence is, more accurately, the structural fact that the muscle that has been scanning the room for what is wanted from me has been operating with so much priority over the underlying preferences that the preferences have, in some real way, stopped producing audible signals.
How the muscle actually developed
The muscle is, on close examination, considerably older than I would prefer it to be. The muscle was not, in any single dramatic moment, installed. The muscle was, more accurately, the slow accumulated result of a particular childhood configuration in which the small daily work of identifying what the adults in my house wanted from me was, by structural necessity, the work I needed to do in order to navigate the household with the minimum amount of friction.
The household was not, on close examination, particularly hostile. The household was, more accurately, structured around a set of adult preoccupations that did not, by structural design, leave much room for the various small ordinary needs that a child has. The scanning was, in this context, adaptive. The scanning allowed me to figure out, with reasonable reliability, what the adults were currently in the mood for, and to calibrate my behavior to whatever the available evidence suggested was going to produce the least friction. The calibration was small. The calibration, accumulated across the entire decade of my childhood, produced a muscle that has been operating, ever since, as the default background activity of how I am in the presence of other people.
The muscle was useful in my twenties. The muscle allowed me, in the various professional and social situations of early adult life, to be the kind of person that the wider environment found easy to engage with. The wider environment, accordingly, engaged with me. The engagement produced, by every visible measure, the kind of adult social life that the wider register would characterize as successful. I built the restaurants. I had the relationships. I made the friends. I had the dinners.
What I did not, on close examination, have at any point during this period was a particularly clear sense of what I actually liked. The not-having was, in some real way, structurally invisible to me. The muscle was operating so continuously that I had no available comparison condition against which to register that the muscle was, in fact, running. The muscle was just how I existed. The existing produced, by structural design, the various external outcomes that the wider environment was rewarding me for, and the rewards were, in some real way, the only evidence I had about whether what I was doing was working.
What the moment last month actually consisted of
The moment last month, when I noticed the muscle, was small. I was at the dinner. The dinner was winding down. The waiter asked me, in the small specific moment that the dinner produced between the dessert and the leaving, what I would like for coffee. The question was, by every external measure, trivial. The question was also, on close examination, the moment in which I noticed, for the first time in I do not know how long, that my apparatus had no immediate answer to it.
My apparatus had several available responses. My apparatus had, more specifically, the various responses calibrated to what the other three people at the table had ordered, the various responses calibrated to what the restaurant was likely to do best, the various responses calibrated to what would be socially appropriate to the situation. My apparatus did not have, on the available internal evidence, any clear signal about what I, in any direct sense, wanted to drink.
I noticed the absence of the signal. The noticing was, in some real way, the first time in my adult life that I had registered the absence. I had been making coffee decisions, and food decisions, and clothing decisions, and various other small daily preference decisions for thirty-eight years, on the basis of the calibrated responses my muscle had been producing. I had not, on close examination, been aware that the calibrated responses were a substitute for some other kind of signal that should have been there. The not-being-aware was the structural feature. The muscle had been so continuous that the alternative had become invisible.
I ordered, in the actual moment, what the person sitting next to me had ordered. The ordering took less than a second. The ordering was, by every external measure, the same kind of ordering I had been performing for decades. What was different, more accurately, was that I noticed, in real time, that the ordering was occurring without any input from whatever the underlying preference layer might have been. The noticing has not, since the moment, gone away.
What I have been doing in the month since
What I have been doing in the month since, in some small ongoing way, is paying attention to the muscle. The paying-attention is not, on close examination, the same thing as stopping the muscle from operating. The muscle continues to operate. The paying-attention is, more modestly, the small ongoing practice of noticing, in real time, when the muscle is producing the response that I would otherwise have treated as my own preference.
The noticing is uncomfortable. The noticing reveals, on close examination, that considerably more of what I have been treating as my own preferences across decades has been the muscle’s output rather than any direct preference of my own. The food I have been ordering at restaurants where I am with other people. The films I have been agreeing to watch. The opinions I have been advancing in conversations that I have, on closer examination, been calibrating to what the other participants seemed to want me to think. The various forms of small daily compromise that I had been treating as the natural texture of being a social adult.
What I have not, on close examination, yet been able to do is hear the underlying preferences clearly enough to know what I would actually be choosing in the absence of the muscle. The underlying preferences are, in some real way, still structurally muffled by thirty years of the muscle running on top of them. The hearing of them is going to require, on the available evidence of how long it took to install the muscle, considerably more than a month of attention to undo. The undoing may not, in any complete sense, be possible. The muscle was installed at a particular developmental stage when the apparatus was structurally calibrated to install things permanently. The undoing may, more modestly, only be partial.
What the partial undoing actually looks like, in practice
What the partial undoing has looked like, in the month since I noticed the muscle, is the small ongoing practice of pausing, in selected moments, before producing the calibrated response. The pause is brief. The pause is, in some real way, the small structural space in which the underlying preference, if there is one, has the opportunity to produce a signal that the muscle would otherwise have overridden.
The pause produces, in most cases, no signal. The underlying preference layer has not, on the available evidence of the last month, been particularly available for direct consultation. The muscle then produces, in the absence of a signal, the calibrated response it would have produced anyway. The calibrated response is what gets delivered to the external situation. The pause is, accordingly, almost entirely invisible from outside.
What the pause does, in some small ongoing way, is to maintain my awareness that the calibrated response is the calibrated response rather than some direct expression of my own interior. The awareness is small. The awareness is, in some real way, the only piece of internal infrastructure I have currently figured out how to build to undo the structural condition the muscle has produced. The infrastructure does not, by itself, undo the condition. The infrastructure, more modestly, prevents me from continuing to mistake the condition for the underlying truth of who I am.
What I want to acknowledge, finally
I am thirty-eight. I have spent, on close examination, my entire adult life trying to be the version of myself that makes the people around me comfortable. The trying has, by every visible measure, succeeded. The people around me have, in most cases, been comfortable. The wider environment has rewarded the comfort-making with the various forms of recognition that the wider environment offers to people who are good at making other people comfortable.
What I did not, until last month, register was that the comfort-making had been running on top of something else that should have been there, and that the something else had been getting progressively more inaudible across decades of the muscle’s continuous operation. The something else is, in some real way, the version of myself that I would have been if the muscle had not, at age eight or wherever, been installed as the default operating system.
I do not, on close examination, know who that version is. The not-knowing is, in some real way, the structural fact I am now sitting in. The version may, on the available evidence of how deeply the muscle has been installed, never become fully available to me. What I can do, more modestly, is the slow ongoing work of paying attention to the muscle, of noticing when the muscle is producing the calibrated response, and of allowing whatever small signals the underlying preference layer is still able to produce to get slightly more airtime than they have been getting for the previous thirty years. The work is small. The work is, in some real way, what the rest of my adult life, lived honestly, is now going to be quietly organized around. The quietly is the structural condition. The wider environment will not, in most cases, notice that the work is occurring. The not-noticing is, on close examination, the fact that the muscle has been the part of me the wider environment has been calibrating its responses to all along.