Nakedly Mistakeful
Nakedly Mistakeful
Silvy Rianingrum
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| Star Trek: The Original Series S02E25 "Bread and Circuses" |
There is constant pressure, undesirable pushes from all sides, for us to dream to be, to want to be, for us to truly become someone, another someone, somebody important. In a continuing search for decent tranquility, for a cease of clamor life throws at us, for everything jeopardizing the mind, we tend to lose ourselves in the voices. We scream, but only into the void. The scary grip of nightmares, the undeniable ever-growing pain produced by insecurities, the often-felt shudder from rejections, all combined, creep into ourselves through million open scars people have left bleeding from their mean scratches upon our skins. The search never ends nonetheless.
“You are attributing your self-value to a set of standards that simply do not exist,” said Spock to Jim.[1] These very words of Spock’s, written down beautifully by a talented fanfiction author, hit home. Those imaginary ideals crash into our minds like the holy words of a God’s. We know they cannot possibly always be true, yet we obey them. What others expect from us is what keeps us bundled in caging misery. What others think we ought to be is what weakens our belief in ourselves. What others say they see in us is what gets into our heads. Unsteady strange hands slowly unfold our layers. Without a sharp observation, oversights rise.
Following decrees proposed by others, we constantly seek their validation, even when we think we don’t. We are led to fight our hellish insecurities provoked by an illusory system built by strangers’ standards. We watch the way others look at us. While we desire to be looked at with tenderness and love, those eyes often reflect only judgments and condescension. While we fight for beautiful songs our lives might have in store, our ears catch only twaddle about us. Sometimes we have no choice but to devour the whirling noises.
Allen Ginsberg in Kill Your Darlings[2] said, “Because I don't want to be the person they think I am.” We rebel by trying to prove the opposite of or to go beyond what others expect of us. The tempting thoughts of possessing hidden qualities, of having an opportunity to surprise others with our not-yet revealed pieces, of unknown and unsolved mysteries, of being the mystery itself linger in our heads. Even when we rebel, we silently measure the standards to not fully go against them. We might unconsciously only aim to derail others from their expectations, not to entirely erase them.
Despite what others see in us, we know our deepest secrets, our desires, and hopes, our everything, not excluding flaws we want to repel. The dissatisfaction as we see our deflections in the mirror defeats our confidence. We leave many marks on parts of ourselves we want to change. We tattoo notes in our memory of things we dislike about ourselves. We blame the mirror, although the fault is ours. It is our mistake to consider ourselves filthy because we are flawed. It is our mistake to treat ourselves with so much hatred, with no gentleness. We are stuck in a labyrinth of our own confusion of what should be accepted and what should not, of what is changeable and what is not. We find the labyrinth more inescapable every day because we weave a path further from the door in which the matching key should be placed. The matching key is love given by us for ourselves. Only with the key can the door be unlocked. “If we could just not hate ourselves so much. That's it, you know. If we could just learn not to hate ourselves . . . quite so very much,” said Michael in a 1970 movie named The Boys in the Band.[3]
We are nakedly mistakeful—a made-up phrase spoken by Chris Pine.[4] We cannot spare ourselves from the pain our mistakes in the past have caused us, nor can we be certain we will not make the same or new mistakes in the future. We see mistakes as something avoidable. But under certain circumstances, mistakes are inevitable. When that happens, we find it hard to forgive ourselves because we think we can always prevent ourselves from making mistakes. Franz Kafka said,
For sparing yourself is impossible; this apparent sparing of yourself has brought you to the verge of your destruction. . . . One cannot spare oneself, cannot calculate things in advance. You haven’t the faintest idea of what would be better for you. [5]
To achieve reconciliation with ourselves, the best thing we can do is exactly what Kafka said, “Rise up, then. Mend your ways. Start seeing what you are instead of calculating what you should become. There is no question of your first task: become a soldier.”[6]
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[1] Taken from a fanfiction written by user spicyshimmy on archiveofourown.org, link: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/pseuds/spicyshimmy
[2] A 2013 movie about three beat poets, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Jack Kerouac, directed by John Krokidas, IMDb page: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1311071/
[4] Said by Chris Pine during an interview for his movie, People Like Us, link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDAT31cIKD0&t=26s
[5] and [6] One of Kafka’s diary entries shared on Twitter by user @Franz_K_Diaries, link: https://twitter.com/Franz_K_Diaries/status/1181401205945356288?s=20