ON KNOWLEDGE, ANXIETY, AND BEING BORING

07 Feb ON KNOWLEDGE, ANXIETY, AND BEING BORING

So many people tell me when we get a bit close, that they think of themselves as stupid and boring. This makes them feel anxious and depressed.  These are common feelings that most of us have at times; it can be a godsend, when it helps us to catch ourselves in our low moments, to improve and meet the challenges of our environment.  However, there are people that have this as a constant perception of themselves.  They may feel incompetent and ashamed or even when they do well, they feel like frauds: they passed, but they had fooled their audience.  There is a torturing voice inside constantly self-doubting and judging harshly.  As a consequence, these people either avoid social situations, often hiding close to the wallpaper, or engage with anxiety.  This self-perception is often faulty and keeps many of them isolated and prevents them from dating and from networking toward more fulfilling careers.  I can think of a number of issues that are involved here, often overlapping, though every human is a unique complex composition.

The first is a practical one.  Each culture values its own body of knowledge, the particular lenses that help us to construct the world according to our invisible shared sets of biases.  This knowledge also helps us to be assertive, respected and not to be manipulated by others.  So I agree with these people, when they say that culture is important and that it is a good thing to know and educate oneself, both in formal and informal ways.  Where I often disagree, is in their drivenness to fill themselves with knowledge and with their perception of themselves, as lacking, as stupid, and boring.  Indeed, many of these people are exceptionally curious and knowledgeable.  Some deny that, others minimize their areas of interest as silly or unimportant.  Others can recognize their knowledge and mental capacities, but are capable of exploring and thinking only when alone; in social situations, they feel threatened and their mind goes blank. This last group is indeed incapable of performing at its full potential. In those occasions, when anxiety automatically channels all their energies toward a fight/flight response, the higher regions of their thinking are temporarily undermined and survival strategies predominate.   Given this chain reaction, their perception may be correct: they may be “boring” and they may look almost invisible to others, because in these situations, to protect themselves from an expected danger, they become closed off from the emotional and lively aspects of themselves. Their body is there, but their spirits are hidden deep inside, temporarily inaccessible to them and others.

To tackle this problem we need to acquire insight into the origins of the unhelpful thinking and faulty perception, tracing it back to its historical origins of their feeling “stupid” and “boring.”  It is important to see the difference between what was taking place back then and now.  It is important to process the emotional trauma that is at the origin of their experience.  Another crucial point is to recognize one’s faulty thinking when it is taking place, in the present, by monitoring one’s moods and reactions, by looking at concomitant thoughts. It is important to assess if there are underlying negative beliefs about oneself, if one perpetuates a schema of oneself as small, incompetent, and unsafe in the world.  Often there is no good evidence that proves such thinking and often there is work to be done to modify such distorted thinking.  It is important to challenge the relentless negative beliefs and to embrace a more realistic assessment of oneself and the situation.  One needs to engage on a constant recalibrating, at least at the beginning, when the negative thoughts are still strong and automatic.

Changing the negative beliefs of being stupid and boring and of being perceived as such by others does not only involve work on thoughts and schemas from the comfort of one’s couch.  For this fear to be properly extinguished or diminished, one has to practice exposure; it is important to leave the wall paper and engage, gradually, with the world outside.  I am not recommending jumping from the wall paper to the top of the table to improvise a toast for strangers.  I am recommending gradual exposure, increasing the difficulty of the task little by little, as one accumulates positive feedback, self-confidence, and tools.

The other ingredient needed for the successful resolution of this problem is self-acceptance, making enough room inside oneself to be ok with the way one is at the moment, with kindness and compassion. Until one cannot make room for loving self-acceptance, and loving acceptance of the things as they are, one is too paralyzed and cannot really move forward.  This is, I think, a very sticky point which requires quite a bit of energy spent in therapy.

One last point I want to make is against the tyranny of knowledge.  As said above, knowledge is a tool of growth, self-empowerment and self-defense.  Even to fight mainstream culture, one has to know it.  Mainstream knowledge allows us to navigate successfully society and fit in. But we have unequal access to it and one way or another, we are all somewhat disempowered. The overemphasis on knowledge, its idealization, it’s a bit like a fetish, and it keeps us all in an inferior position, always needing to know more, to acquire more, an endless desire that keeps us lacking and wanting.  Many of the people I know who feel boring and stupid are victims of this process.  They exhibit perfectionistic tendencies and place excessive importance on some highly marked area of knowledge. There is always someone who knows so much about that poet, or the stock market, or what have you; they feel they don’t know enough and therefore are “boring.”  This admiration for learning and learned people, as a thing in itself, distracts them from their own internal treasure. What makes people interesting is not how much knowledge they can recite.  For better or worse, we have Google for that. What makes people interesting, is what they do at the intersection between themselves, their knowledge, and the world, how they uniquely play and react to what is in front of them.  It is a little bit like cooking.  One day one has just a few tomatoes and some garlic and cheese and one can still make delicious pasta.  Another day, one may have more ingredients.  What is really important is to have inside oneself enough grounding to be free to play, to have the courage to make mistakes, to be aware of one’s own reactions to things, letting a safe encounter happen between the internal world and what is in front of us; then maybe something is “cooked” inside and emerges naturally, if there is no pressure. Of course, knowledge is important; it’s great to know about arts and culture.  But our imperfect knowledge and the lack of knowledge should not intimidate us to the point or not playing the game and marking our place of exclusion; idealized knowledge is disempowering since it takes away from our unique capacity to connect with the world from our own unique perspective and point of entry.  Indeed, each different point of entry can be a source of empowerment, creativity, and enrichment for us and others.