An External Gaze
Much as I noted the other day my reticence to offer a pull quote from the very end of a novel, I dislike pulling from the very end of someone else’s blog post, but the fact is that it’s the very end of Winnie’s such about selfdom that I need to highlight.
I offer a suggestion that there is a sense of self that exists that doesn’t require an external gaze to feel more whole. It is possible to cherish our selves so much that we seek to protect our selves from external forces instead. To wish to maintain that integrity so much that external measurements cease to matter, because what matters more is living a life congruent to our inner-selves.
If you read me often enough, you might see that consideration of the above exists for me in tension with my continuing belief that #FrannyWasRight, and that spending my time writing here is just so much “ego, ego, ego”, and just so much pursuit of outside recognition, of the validation of being seen and heard.
Franny Glass says she’s “sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody” and what she’s after in that very much is Winnie’s “sense of self that exists that doesn’t require an external gaze to feel more whole”. Franny wants to be a “nobody” not in the sense of not having a self but in the sense of having one that is self-generated and self-sustaining and self-protecting.
My ongoing inner conflict between my senses of self is inextricable from the fact that my financial existence is inherently self-limiting—in that being entirely financially self-insufficient, my life has a clock on it and no amount of flailing to be seen or heard can change that. Everyone’s does, of course, it’s just that there’s always this background hum to my days reminding me that when my only financial support is gone, I’ll have about four to five months left until everything falls apart completely and in its entire.
It’s not so much, then, that I require in and of itself “an external gaze to feel more whole” so much as knowing that the political and social structures in which I live make me a burden and the sheer weight of that makes me seek counterbalance—and it’s difficult to find that counterbalance entirely within oneself. Or, at least, it is for me.
When I can disappear from social media for five days and have no one notice, what does that say about me? (What does it say about me that such a parasocial invisibility, which is all any of that even is, had that much effect on me?) How do I sustain whatever intrinsic sense of self I might have when the large “external forces” control so much of my fate, and the smaller ones—who don’t even actually owe me anything—don’t notice when I am gone?
It’s true, even if not entirely in evidence here on the blog, that to an extent what’s been happening over the past several weeks is that after losing all hope I’ve come into a sense of surrender (or is it resignation?) that my life doesn’t matter and is destined for slow and then fairly quick dissolution (although the actual death anxiety itself very much remains), but I cannot quite find the same sense of calm when it comes to the fact that I still believe Franny Glass.
Why can’t I just find “the courage to be an absolute nobody” and go about whatever remains of my life, in the face of the “external forces” that ultimately don’t want me to be here, and in the face of parasocial acquaintances who don’t actually have the responsibility to provide me validation?
Look, ultimately what all of this hullabaloo boils down to is that the Mega Millions or Powerball win can’t come soon enough. Let’s take away the existential angst (if not the death anxiety), and then maybe we can talk about how I can find “a sense of self […] that doesn’t require an external gaze to feel more whole”.
Addenda
- The above is a mess and a muddle. What I mean to say is this: I do not know how to maintain my inner-self when my mere existence is entirely dependent upon first a transient and then, eventually, an entirely absent external concern and care. Given this, I cannot find “the courage to be an absolute nobody” and my sense of self seeks “an external gaze to feel more whole”. The above ends with a frivolous prayer to the lottery gods because it’s literally my only hope of ridding myself of the need for external support just to survive, and needing external support just to survive renders me, it seems, mostly incapable of focusing on any intrinsic self, and that self’s inherent worth and value, even if I know it is there.