The Good Fight

One of the most difficult relationship in our life is the one we have with ourselves. The difficulty of it lies in the ability to accept the things about ourselves which we cannot change, whilst making the effort to change the things we can. The balance of maintaining discipline without beating ourselves up for the smallest failure is the hardest thing to get right. And so, a lot of the time, this tricky relationship oscillates between two extremes: self-deprecation/hatred and an overestimated sense of one’s own value and perpetual innocence. Both are harmful.

We are surrounded by slogans such “Be good to yourself,” “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken,” and hipster motivation posters, currently very popular on social media, which are meant to make us feel better about ourselves. Paradoxically, these messages won’t do much for a person whose inner critic is in full rage. The reason for it is that, as David Wong, the author of 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person, says: “you don’t hate yourself because you have low self-esteem, or because other people were mean to you. You hate yourself because you don’t do anything.” If “being good to yourself” means being kind, gentle and understanding towards our own weaknesses and comforting us in our state of inertia, then it can only reinforce the dissatisfaction we have with ourselves.

I’m currently devouring an excellent book by Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn it and use if for life. In a chapter dedicated to “scratching,” a term she uses to describe the first phase of every project, i.e. looking for ideas, she talks about maintaining the “White Hot Pitch”. This phrase, borrowed from office jargon, refers to the kind of temper tantrum a boss is likely to throw at a meeting to wake his employees up when a project is going badly. Interestingly, Wong’s article quotes the famous speech given by Blake (played by Alec Baldwin) in James Foley’s adaptation of David Mamet’s Glengarry Glenn Ross. Blake tells a group of lousy salesmen them that they’re about to be fired unless they “close” the sales they’ve been assigned. While some people might welcome this harsh wake-up call and be grateful for a lesson, the more common reaction is resistance and bitterness. “What an a*hole!,” many would say, and begin to look for anything about the boss they can criticise.

Baldwin’s tantrum isn’t nice. He’s loud, offensive and vulgar. But that’s the sort of emotion Twyla is referring to when she says: “Throw a tantrum at yourself.” Get angry. Do something!

As someone, who used to struggle to control anger in their teenage years, and spent the years following puberty learning from the stoics how to approa