I was not acting like me, are you acting like you?

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About two years ago, someone betrayed me socially in a deeply violating and novel way. It was a betrayal that I couldn’t have expected, because I’d never heard of anything like it. Everybody who heard the story was like, “What the fuck, that can happen?” Funnily enough, I actually had an intuition about what was transpiring, before I found out—I thought, okay, wait, did person X do bizarre thing Y? It was a ridiculous enough possibility that a therapist friend told me that such paranoid thoughts evidenced a state of emotional activation, and that I should be skeptical of my speculation. That was a fair read of the situation. And yet my paranoid intuition turned out to be the truth. 

The betrayal didn’t cause any material damage to my life. But it did present a novel way in which someone could be untrustworthy, which, in turn, made it clear that I was somewhat naive about how people can act towards me. 

For the next year and a half of my life, I was uncharacteristically introverted. Usually, when I move to a new place, I am very active about cultivating a new social life—I throw many parties, spend a lot of time exploring the terrain with new friends, and generally attempt to maintain a persistently high level of extroversion. But after moving to the Bay, I went out less, was less likely to take people up on social invitations, and made little attempt to explore my new setting with the kind of zeal I brought to previous cities I’d encountered in my adult life, like Bangkok and LA. This made me less happy. There was arguably the upside of making it easier to stay focused on my new company, but historically, I find it easier to work when I have more social energy in my life, so it was probably a wash. Only recently have I returned to my normal level of outgoingness and adventurousness, which has made me happier.

I didn’t make the connection between these two events in my head until recently. It never occurred to me that I felt the world was less socially secure. When I decided not to accept a social invitation, I didn’t think, “apparently, people can fuck me over in novel ways, so I’m less interested in people.” Instead, I would come up with a story about how the party would be boring, or how I probably had nothing to say to the people there, or I should stay in and get work done (when I am bad at working in the evenings, and fully aware of it.) There were convincing-sounding reasons in my head why the Bay wasn’t a good social atmosphere for me—which is funny, because the Bay is culturally more receptive to my particular weirdness than maybe 99% of the world.

The lesson here is not that I shouldn’t have become more paranoid. I think it was reasonable to update my behavior based on what happened. But my paranoia could’ve been a lot more effective. Effective paranoia would have looked like incorporating a rather specific message: “As you build your internet audience, it’s more likely that unsavory people will be drawn into your world—so, be less transparent and trusting with new people, especially people you don’t meet through trusted friends.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, it seems like what happened is that, somewhere in me, there’s a dashboard that stores my background assumptions about the world, and the “general social safety” dial got turned down a little bit, without my realizing it. So my nervous system learned a lesson that wasn’t 100% wrong, but certainly not as granular as it could’ve been. My behavior was crudely adjusted to avoid downside, and this was probably net negative.

I only noticed this when I heard myself explaining the benefits of extroversion to someone, and realized that I had not actually been that extroverted recently, that this was better as a retrospective description of my behavior. It was strange to look back at the previous year of my life and realize that I’d been avoiding people somewhat, that my declared values had quietly been replaced with another, slightly different set of values. I was not the person I was familiar with.

Before I noticed what was happening, I had no opportunity to counteract on my lowered level of trust in the social world. It was a background mental process, quietly generating thoughts about why I shouldn’t leave my home, which I took at face value. But once I became aware of what was really going on, I could notice the phenomenon on the level of feeling—I could see that behind the thoughts about how the party would not be fun, there was a gut-level unease lurking. And once I saw the feeling as it was, I could act in spite of it, leaving my house anyway. By doing this, I gathered more evidence supporting the idea that my social world is not actually that adversarial, and the lurking feeling went away.

I’m glad that I interrupted this behavioral loop. But it occurs to me that I could’ve caught it much earlier if I had been in the habit of repeatedly asking myself: am I behaving in accordance with my values? If not, is there a good explanation, or am I just being bossed around by a mysterious sense of unease? I have now built questions like this into my weekly planning routine. 

I think it is worth considering that something similar might be going on with you, or might in the future. I think we all have gut-level sentiments about the world that influence our behavior: how safe we are socially, how safe we are professionally, how likely we are to be rewarded for aberrant behavior, how scary the downsides of straying off our usual path are. And I think that much of the time, these gut feelings are concealed—we’re only primarily aware of their subsidiary manifestations, not the feelings themselves.

So, take a moment to consider your gut-level disposition towards the world, which is something you might not always be able to perceive directly. You say that you are curious about people, interested in trying new things, that you value beauty and novelty, that you want to finish this project. Well, okay: is there evidence of this on your calendar this week? If not, I’m sure there are reasons for this that come to mind. But perhaps these reasons are not genuine, or not the core issue. Maybe it’s a matter of gut feeling. And perhaps that feeling is derived from an incorrect lesson you didn’t choose to learn. 

Photo credit goes to Saul Leiter.