You must begin to think of yourself as becoming the person you want to be. – David Viscott
“You don’t know yourself any better than you know anyone else,” she says forcefully. “I don’t know what gives people this weird notion that they’re so well acquainted with themselves; you have to go through years of psychoanalysis to find out what’s going on in your unconscious mind, right? You see yourself interacting with the world, you see yourself in the mirror, you identity yourself with certain groups, you position yourself in society the same way you position a fictional character. I think people really gravely overestimate how much they know about themselves, especially if you limit your interaction with the world, if you have routines and stay in your comfort zone, you don’t know yourself: forget it!” – Nell Zink.
After Nike canned my ass, and I went months and months without finding a new position, I was networking with a hotshot young woman in Seattle – Jay Rockey set me up – and she told me, you are not fooling anybody. Then she explained how everybody got up in the morning, put on a costume and headed out to confront the day. You, she said, refuse to wear a costume.
“You are the hero of your own life story. The kind of story you want to tell yourself about yourself has a lot to do with the kind of person you are and can become. You can listen to (or read in books or watch in films) stories about other people. But that is only because you know, at some basic level, that you are – or could be – the hero of those stories, too. You are Ahab in Moby Dick, you are Michael Corleone in The Godfather, you are Rick or Ilsa in Casablanca, Jim in Lord Jim, or the tramp in City Lights. And out of these make-believe selves, all of them your own self-in-the-making, you learn, if you were lucky and canny enough, to invent a better you than you could have before the story was told.” – Frank McConnell.
In How To Write A Damn Good Novel, James N. Frey discusses the difference between natural man (homo sapiens) and fictional man (homo fictus).
Homo fictus is simpler.
Homo fictus has hotter passions and colder anger, travels more, fights more, loves more, changes more, has more sex. Lots more sex. Homo fictus has more of everything. Even if he’s plain, dull and boring, he’s more extraordinary in his plainess, dullness and boringness than his real-life counterpart.
Human beings sometimes do foolish things. They misspeak, they forget, they buy when they should sell, they miss opportunities, they’re blind to the obvious. In effect, they are not at all times and in all situations operating at their maximum capacity. Not so with homo fictus.
The principle of maximum capacity does not require that a character always be at an absolute maximum, but is at the maximum within that character’s capability.
Homo fictus always operates at his maximum capacity and it is never within a dramatic character’s maximum capacity, when faced with a problem or a challenge, to do nothing.
“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.” – David Foster Wallace.
I ignore all my neighbors. I know none of them and they all identify me by name. “Hey, Jack!” like I’m gonna give’em more than a wave. You think I’m walking the dog, when I am really out here kicking ass. Pretending to be crushing Tommy Derderian or Tim Tays.
I give the neighbors code names, witty nome de roads like Blonde With Two Black Dogs. Turns out The Lesbian Love Triangle is three sisters who retired in unison.
Military nurses, I think, who stopped the Mrs. the other day and asked if she was Jack’s wife.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Oh, he seems so nice and, – here I imagine a coy giggle – and so elegant.”
Which is the impression one leaves when all folks ever hear you say is Thank You and Have A Nice Day.
Anything that was smart to do before, is probably smart to do now.
I know all their dogs’ names.
Don’t be yourself, be better than that.
Become your own hero.