Most personality traits don’t have ‘valence’ — they’re not positive or negative. They are just traits. Much depends on how society categorizes the trait as valuable, useful, or positive. It can flux across different social groups. Conscientious and analytical, for example, are traits that are pretty universally strong/accepted. Other traits fall somewhere in the grey area. Sometimes valued sometimes not depending on the beholder: introversion, openness, directness, strength of will.
That’s why if you’re in the wrong social group, workplace, or even family, it can be really damaging because you feel like you can never truly belong. Conflicting beliefs are maladaptive for group peace. A group that requires strong adherence to rules may not value or praise willingness to dissent. You might begin to think that it’s a bad thing to be the way you are, or that perhaps you need to squeeze yourself in tightly to fit a box of a certain shape. Environmental pruning and withering is acute. The wrong place makes a person start to discard or hide what’s real and true about themselves, and blunt their own spikiness to fit the norm.
If you’re sensitive to human dynamics you can intuitively assess how a place or person values the skills and capabilities you have. Ironically, I’ve noticed that most traditionally labelled ‘high achievers’ aren’t attuned to how external set-ups affect them because they can function relatively well across many, or they’re really good at subverting their own needs.
Something quiet and insidious starts to happen if you stay in the wrong environments for too long. You convince yourself that you’re operating well or you can successfully override your uncomfortable feelings, or perhaps that you can configure yourself into what other people want through sheer brute force. It begins with people pleasing and ends with self abandonment. It fundamentally limits your ceiling, whether you actively acknowledge it or not.
I can’t understate the importance of finding a place where you can fully express and iterate on your strengths. Whether it’s online or in person, at work or in personal social settings. Great relationships rewire the way you think about yourself. They can reframe the mired narrative you’ve conjured in your head. Some people can recognize a kernel of greatness and nurture it. In the best case, relationships can enable you with agency and spirit to become more yourself.
I used to hide my spikiness, or the parts of me that were idiosyncratic and hard to grasp or explain. It’s a whole life’s work to bridge your internal and external worlds after all. I wanted my external environment to tell me I was okay, so I aligned myself neatly to those goalposts. But after all that wrangling and effort of proving I was okay, the simple fact I kept running into this inconvenient, roundabout, way is that acceptance has to come from within - or at least I have to be comfortable with volatility of environment. I’ll belong and not belong and belong again. The only stable, peaceful thing I have, which is my power, is knowing who I am. There’s uncertainty of which road you’ll take, which door will open and close at the right window, but there’s no uncertainty of what you care about, what you pay attention to and therefore, who you are.
I thought this concept of acceptance was beautifully put by Kanjun:
Acceptance is about accurately computing ("seeing") the value of what we have. If we don't accept what we have, then we're ignoring its value. This results in wasteful behavior: we'll spend a lot of energy throwing away what we have and seeking out value in other places (grass is greener syndrome) that's not actually higher than what we have, but that we perceive as being higher because we undervalue what we have.
Acceptance allows us to properly value what we have. This means we can then see how to spend our energy building on top of what's currently valuable. This means value gained per energy spent is much higher, because we're building on existing value rather than trying to find value in a totally new place.
All this to say — being distinctly yourself is sometimes not practical, rational, or even socially rewarded. But what you get in return is more honest connections with the people that matter, more rootedness within the self. For all my spiky people, I hope you know: the value is always there, even if you don’t always see it.
Recent reads
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin - a powerful and extremely sorrowful book
“Tell me, he said, "What is this thing about time? Why is it better to be late than early? People are always saying, we must wait, we must wait. what are they waiting for?"
"Well I guess people wait in order to make sure of what they feel."
"And when you have waited—has it made you sure?”
Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
Over time, beautiful things tend to thrive and ugly things tend to be discarded. Unfortunately, the amount of time involved can be longer than human lifetimes
What is technology? It’s technique. It’s the way we all do things. And when you discover a way to do things, its value is multiplied by all who use it. It is the proverbial fishing rod rather than the fish. That’s the difference between a startup and a restaurant or a barber shop. You fry eggs or cut hair one customer at a time. Whereas if you solve a technical problem you help everyone who uses your solution. That’s leverage.
Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky brothers, also the rough basis for the hauntingly beautiful movie Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky which I watched in Mission’s Roxie Theatre -
‘You ask: what makes man great?’” he quoted. “‘Is it that he re-created nature? That he harnessed forces of almost-cosmic proportions? That in a brief time he has conquered the planet and opened a window onto the universe? No! It is that despite all this, he has survived, and intends to continue doing so.’
Look into my soul, I know—everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can’t be bad!
Current reads
Art is Life by Jerry Saltz
Thinking in Bets (audiobook) by Annie Duke
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
28 Artists and 2 Saints by Joan Acocella
It’s serendipitous to read something that is exactly what you needed to hear; thank you for writing this
- here from twitter
I love this post - the concept of environmental volatility and the realization that you can belong, not belong and belong again was very revealing to me! My takeaway; be grounded in self, and adaptable to environment. Also know how your environment can nourish / drain you based on alignment to your values