Mirror, mirror, on the wall

MoP #3

Post 4 - Part 3 – Hi, I’m Mike

I owe you some answers.

When we left of at the end of Part 2, I promised you a “Why?” and a “How?”. I’m going to do my best to make good on that promise. The answering is proving difficult not because I don’t know the answers but have never tried to explain them before.

If nothing else, you’ll probably come out of this piece knowing me better. Whether you see me in a different light and whether that light is better, worse, or neither… well, I guess we shall find out. You can tell me in the comments. I will be interested in knowing.

The two questions I left open in Part 2:

1) Why do I write? Put more sharply, what am I looking to get out of it?

2) How do I write specifically to try to get that?

I’m going to start with the “How?”

There are two animating facets of who I am which influence the near entirety of how I navigate the world. They don’t just influence how I write; they influence how I think, act, interact, form relationships, behave within them, communicate, see others, and present myself.

So, they play a kinda big role in the Miking of Mike.

To explain them, I need to explain how they came to be.

As I’ve mentioned ad infinitum, I grew up in an alcoholic home. My parents separated when I was seven. I split time between their homes ever after. My father was a depressive alcoholic; so, I spent nearly all of my weekends as a kid from seven-years old on sequestered in a small New York City apartment with someone who was usually drinking and usually depressed.

My father had grown up in a household that ran on a dynamic where the parent applied a constant downward pressure on the kids to soothe their own needs. Intense guilt-tripping. Withdrawal of approval and love if not appeased. My father’s mother laid on an absolutely smothering blanket of guilt to try to get her kids to do what she wanted.

My father hated it. He did the exact same thing.

As anyone who has grown up with a parent like that can attest, leveraging guilt – or using any coercive emotional pressure, really – doesn’t require it to be said out loud. If you’ve ever had a partner respond to you asking if they’re okay with a curt “I’m fine.” when you know they aren’t, you already fully get that emotion doesn’t need to be expressed to be felt. It, therefore, also doesn’t need to be expressed to be used as a weapon.

Now, add to that already highly dysfunctional stew a central dynamic of alcoholic homes: the cone of silence.

The alcoholism and the person’s drinking itself are both locked down tighter than one of those mountain fortresses where they store nuclear weapons. The problematic things are right out in the open and seen by everyone but CANNOT be mentioned or talked about.

As a kid, it felt like the world would end if I said anything about my father’s drinking to him. It felt like doing that would set off an explosion which would take down the building.

So, couple all of the above together and you have oppressive pressure to do the things that make the parent feel better while not feeling good yourself and while not being able to speak a word about the elephant in the room packed with dynamite.

When you are a kid, you are simultaneously living one life while also coming to understand what other people’s lives are like. You are making sense of the world… both your little corner of it and everyone else’s.

Between TV, movies, media, and having friends, you quickly come to realize that your home isn’t normal… and you know that it is different in a way that is worse and bad.

When I was little, my best friend, Doug, lived in the apartment above mine. I can still vividly remember going for a day hike with his family. It was Doug, his father, his brother, and me. I was maybe 7 or 8 at the time. We went to Harriman State Park. I remember nothing of the hike itself. I only remember how it felt and what I thought...

The whole outing… it was so normal and healthy, it felt alien. It was seriously like “Jesus, these people actually just go do things because they want to… and then they just… enjoy doing them… and there’s, like, nothing else to it. Nothing. No guilt or tension. It’s just… the doing of the thing. And they seem to do this ALL THE TIME.”

My dad had a way of including a watermark on every picture. It said “I did this for youuuu…” in a circle around a picture of Eeyore. Had we gone on that same hike – which we would have never - there would have been a palpable subcurrent beneath his every footstep: it had been taken for meeee. Not just with me or for fun. It had been taken as some bestowing of benefit through sacrifice - which I should therefore appreciate as a miniature crucifixion of sorts: My father had suffered so I might hike.

So, that sucked quite a bit. Doug’s family just went off and did things. We didn’t do much of anything without toting around a two-ton trailer of oppressive guilt. No matter Doug’s family got around more.

Growing up with an alcoholic is really not fun. It is very different in big and little ways. Its impacts, however are somewhat patterned.

Now, every home is different and that is true of alcoholic homes too… but kids who grow up in them, no matter how different, often develop in pretty predictable ways. They become adults with sets of personality characteristics which often cluster into one of a few archetypes, if you will.

Each of them is a reaction to what I call “The Mirror Problem”.

As a young kid in an alcoholic home, the world is too big to understand. You are learning about it in real time and that learning is mostly “proximo-distal”. Nearest to furthest. You learn first about what is closest and then what is near and then what is farther “out there in the world”.

The first thing you learn is how your own home works. Before you even know what other homes are like, you already know yours is fucked up. It’s not that you understand what specifically is fucked up and why it is fucked up… You just know something is seriously fucked up because of the cone of silence.

“Wow. That thing we can’t talk about must be REALLY bad if we can’t even talk about it.”

Then, as you start to get a glimpse of the outside world and how families are depicted and how friends’ homes seem to work, you start to see how theirs work differently than yours. You still don’t grasp the adult concepts behind what makes the dysfunction… well, dysfunctional… but you already knew there was some bad shit in your home… and you knew you couldn’t tell anyone… and now you know that other homes don’t seem to be like that…

…and that completes a logical circuit for you:

Ohhhh, this thing about my home is shameful. If people saw the elephant, it would be embarrassing. They would look at us shamefully.

*us*.

There is no “me” fully detached from “we” as a kid. You’re in the family. You aren’t a guest at an inn. The family reputation and what people think of your parents is a major influencer on your self-esteem at that point. As kids, everyone wants to be proud of their parents, their family. Everyone wants the world to see them favorably.

Believing the world – and the people closest but just outside the center of yours – AKA other kids, their parents, other adults, etc. – would look at your parent - and therefore your home and you - as shameful… it creates a real problem.

Your world isn’t siloed anymore. You get glimpses of other kids’ lives and realize they can get glimpses of yours. In parallel, you know that what the family sees in the mirror would be humiliating if seen by others.

That’s a mirror problem. Not liking the reflection. Needing to keep the world from seeing it somehow.

Kids in alcoholic homes grow up in smoke while hating mirrors. The place is on fire. Its reflection is humiliating.

So, how do you keep the world from seeing a reflection you are ashamed of yourself?

Cover it up?

Keep them from looking this way?

Change something in the reflection?

Those personality archetypes I mentioned – the ones kids from alcoholic homes often come to fall into as adults – well, they track pretty closely to the approach that person took to addressing the mirror problem as a kid which then cemented and became an animating dynamic in their adult life.

As a kid, they were in a situation where the thing they saw reflected back hurt. A lot. What they saw in the mirror caused them a shitload of pain. So they developed some way of making it hurt less.

Before going on, let me just inject one complicating thing about mirrors and how we process what we see in them. There is this whole psychological concept called “the reflected self”. The basic gist is that people see themselves as other people see them. If the people in their life see them as smart, they feel like they are. If they see them as a good person, they feel like they are one. And when people see them as shameful, they think they are.

“You are who people think you are.” is the basic concept of “the reflected self”.

The problem with that model is that it is a flawed way of arriving at self-identity caused by a perspective problem. It causes people to believe that who they actually are as a person is whoever other people think they are. It makes “self-esteem” a byproduct of something external; and that is the opposite of how healthy self-esteem works. In a person with a healthy sense of self, who they believe themselves to be is stable – not rigid per se, just involatile – and, therefore, is not subject to erasure or revision just because someone else disagrees. It isn’t a Wikipedia entry where the contents are whatever the last editor thought they should be.

When you are a kid and you have little in the way of a developed and stable sense of self independent of your environment and the people in it, that “reflected self” thing is in maximum effect; and with so little exposure to what people ACTUALLY think about you, you substitute in what you imagine to be the reflection in place of what it truly shows. You think your perception is a photograph - as if it was a snapshot of what is there in the frame - and therefore, it is what everyone else would see if they looked at you. You are vastly overinfluenced by how you perceive your family’s reflection… and how you perceive it is as something terrible.

As a result, a kid tries to fix the thing causing them pain - their perceived reflection – and since they see the flawed self-mirror they see that reflection in as if it were a camera – as if it would present the same view to anyone who looked - they try to change what is in frame.

They can’t control or fix the actual problems in the frame… the arsonist… the fire source… the fire… the smoke… Can’t change any of that. They don’t have a lot of options… and that’s why they end up falling into one of a few buckets. There were only a few choices…

One of them is to tilt the mirror itself. Do nothing about the reflection; just turn the mirror so it doesn’t point at them anymore. My sister falls into that bucket. It is basically the “nobody look this way” bucket. Attention is excruciating. If we all sit very still, maybe no one will notice the bad stuff in our reflection… She is extremely uncomfortable with conflict and emotional turmoil. After all, that’s smoke… and someone might see. So, her approach is to want to do anything to keep down the smoke. Exit. Avoid. Disengage. Pacify. Just make it go away. Turn the mirror away from the thing drawing focus.

I fall into the “change the reflection” bucket… and there are only so many ways you can do that. There are a lot of different kinds of dysfunctional home environments which all create a reflection problem for the kids in them. The thing they all have in common is that they coerce kids into having to tailor what they present so as to look different in the mirror. The thing that varies highly is what specific method of tailoring they coerce.

Every single kid coerced into tailoring how they present and appear is trying to solve the same problem. They are trying to remedy the same deficiency; and it is a deficiency of the single most important thing to emotional health: love.

They are trying to fill a hole which shouldn’t exist. They are trying to fill their little plastic pail with the water they were supposed to get from their parent.

They are trying to be loved.

The ways to go about that can be healthy or unhealthy themselves.

At the two diametrically opposite ends of the “make people love what they see” spectrum are 1) trying to truly be someone worthy of that love; and 2) not really being anyone at all; and just doing whatever it takes to make people think you are whoever they would love.

I am the first. Donald Trump is the second.

One of the reasons I’ve always understood Trump on this deep, intuitive level is because I have always fully understand the problem he was trying to solve: the central animating dynamic in his childhood which his entire personality was then misengineered to solve.

Over on my side of the spectrum, my approach was to try to be worthy.

Be smart, high-achieving, loyal, empathetic, interesting… strong… resilient.

None of this was ever remotely conscious. I’ve never even thought about it this specifically or in these terms until this past week.

Beneath the machinery of personality formation though, there was an underlying strategy that the route to solving the reflection problem was to simply be someone whose reflection deserved love.

It was like the subconscious idea that if I were that kind of person, people might look in our mirror and see the smoke and fire… and then be like “Jeez, that place is in flames… but, oh my god, HE’S A FIREMAN! How very brave!”

Y’all, I’ve been a lowkey fireman my whole life. On my tombstone, they will write “He was good in a fire.”

I couldn’t put out the fire. I could be someone worthy of love amid the flames.

That “reflected self” thing I explained above... The flawed way of arriving at identity caused by a gap between two different perspectives – your own and that of others – it drove who I became and am – and it drove who someone like Trump became and is.

When there is a gap between perspectives, you can either focus on one, the other, or trying to make them align. I have no idea how you try to make them align. I just included that one for completeness of possibilities TBH.

Ultimately, you choose which one of the two perspectives you think is the photograph: what you see in the mirror or what other people seem to see when looking at you.

I chose the one in the mirror. I subconsciously developed a model of what I wanted to see reflected. I formed a subliminal idea of what a good, lovable, admirable person was. And then I tried to be that person. And, to be honest, whether the model itself is complete or accurate or healthy, I am that person.

I am loyal and thoughtful and caring and resilient and smart and interesting-ish. I believe I am those things. I like the reflection because it is what I believed was a reflection worthy of love long before I was an adult casting it. I became that because I valued it. And now, I am that.

Someone like Trump who focused on manipulating the presentation however required to give an appearance is the opposite. They hold no fixed values; have no stable sense of self; abide by no morals; and instead behave however they think will best manipulate the viewer.

If you’ve followed me for a long time, you’ve probably seen at least somewhat that I draw bright moral lines around certain things. Character, honesty, conviction in your values. I am that way because those are the lines I first drew on paper as a silhouette and then filled in as my own paint-by-numbers. I saw those things as the boxes that, when filled in, were the picture I wanted to see… because, assuredly, so would other people.

While my whole nature and orientation toward my own identity and being who I am is driven by that underlying dynamic. Self-worth as judged against a litmus test that was self-defined.

I am my own harshest critic. I am nearly impervious to injury from judgments I see as untrue. I deserve to be loved and accepted. I don’t give a fuck who doesn’t.

I am comfortable being loved and accepted by only people who I believe know me and see me and understand me – with all of my good and all of my bad – as the complete person I am. The one I see in the mirror.

To me, at some deep level which has never been accessible to me with the clarity of this post until now, my path to trying to solve that childhood problem of a deficiency of love and care was to be someone worthy of it and find people who saw that in me.

And that, at long last, brings me to our “Why?” and “How?”

Why do I write? What am I looking to get out of it? And, how do I write specifically to try to get that.

I write to be loved. To connect. To feel an emotional closeness with, and proximity to, other people.

I write to find my people.

That is why I write.

I write to find my people.

I write to find the ones who will see me and understand me… and who I will see back and understand.

I write to lay bear what I believe to be true about myself because I believe that is enough even when flawed or failing or unhealthy.

I know I have no shortage of flaws and shortcomings; I know I carry far more than a carry-on of baggage which still impacts me and how I manage and sometimes mismanage; and I know that there are plenty of people who can see the full me which I accept as enough and worthy and disagree.

I’m fully aware that there are people who can see the whole me and not think well of me or like me.

I don’t care. I truly don’t.

I care about finding my people. Being among them. Finding the connection and then living in the mutuality of reciprocal acceptance.

That’s the “Why?”

The “How?” – how I write specifically to achieve that - well that’s a little nuanced… but the short answer is that when you are good at reading rooms, you are good at reading people… and when you are good at reading people, you can see the parts of them that line up with parts of you... and then you can talk about them and share them in long-ass Substack posts because the connection with them already exists.

It’s just a matter of the two of you raising your hands so you can find each other in the crowd.

I just raise mine first.