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Am I Doing This Right?

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by

tederick
in

I know what you’re thinking: are you, right now, doing it right? You’re trying your cute little buns off, I’m sure; but is someone out there laughing and pointing at your earnest efforts to do it right? How do you know, anyway, if you’re doing it right in this workaday world with so little time to be contemplative of one’s efforts to do anything, really, at all?

Let me help you.

I attend an online seminar now and again, and something that I am persistently struck with is the sheer quantity of time that instructors spend encouraging some among their students that they are, in fact, doing it right.

Whatever “it” is, nominally the subject of the teaching exercise itself or any of its associated practices. The questions always come up, the moment an instructor asks for them. “Am I doing meditation right?” “Am I doing writing right?” “Am I building sub-classes of species for my entirely made-up planetary environment right?” and so forth.

The questions are not usually so specific. (No one has ever said “Am I doing writing right,” at least not within my earshot.) They tend to be more symptomatic — to continue the same example, they might ask “when I write, I need to have my purple polka-dot socks on, but you [instructor] said that you only wear yellow when you write… Should I buy yellow socks?” — but the meaning of the question tends to be the same: am I doing it right?

Part of this, of course, is the natural pedagogical process. If you’re learning a new thing, your instructor is there to guide you towards improvement on the thing. Questions are useful in this!

After a great deal of repetition of the same sorts of questions over and over again, however, I had to concede that some of these questions and self-checks were not the natural pedagogical process, but due to some kind of in-built insecurity that afflicts, say, a reasonable portion of the population. This got me thinking about personality types, and why some people seem to have this insecurity no matter how far they go, while others, in a variety of modes, seem not to, or redress it in different ways. (What is a bloke having an online fistfight about a movie, if not some kind of attempt to feel secure about whether he’s doing it right?)

Here then, for reference, are the five types of people I’ve encountered in the world, re: the subject of whether one is doing it right:

Type 1: Am I Doing This Right?

  • Need constant reassurance that they are, in fact, Doing It Right
  • Instinctive response to doing anything is “I must be doing this wrong.” Will, by default, assume they are not Doing It Right / not getting it / not getting the most out of it, and that everyone else is (FOMO). 
  • These people mean well but after a certain point you sort of want to smack them for refusing to ever have a moment’s confidence in themselves

Type 2: I Am Doing This Right

  • Conceal their insecurities (even from themselves) around whether or not they’re Doing It Right by becoming experts in Doing It Right
  • Gatekeep the frameworks of how one Does It Right in order to maintain certainty that they, and perhaps only they, are Doing It Right
  • These are the worst people currently living

Type 3: I’m So Mad At You For Thinking I’m Not Doing This Right

  • Project their entire set of insecurities re: Doing It Right onto others, in the form of perceived or expected criticisms
  • Walking self-fulfilling prophecies
  • Absolutely impossible to have relationships with these people

Type 4: That Can’t Be How To Do It Right. Are You Sure You Aren’t Doing It Wrong?

  • Have deeply-held, perhaps politically-unpopular, opinions about what Doing It Right should look like, but don’t feel comfortable expressing those opinions directly in today’s charged climate
  • Instead, they’re just asking questions
  • These people are the hidden powerhouse behind Type 2’s current cultural dominance. They are also awful lays

Type 5: I’m Doing This

  • The winners
  • Congratulations, you cracked it
  • Keep going

Lotsa linkies

Seriously, you guys did great this week, writingwise.

  • I reviewed Chen Kaige’s Farewell My Concubine, newly arrived in a 4K restoration from The Criterion Collection. Now: can anyone teach me how to do that makeup? (Screen Anarchy)
  • Unrelated to the other Andrea Long Chu longread drop this week, I was reading this Andrea Long Chu longread from 2018, and thinking a lot about the connection between desire and identity (it even made a passing appearance in the Farewell My Concubine review, above). The story at the top of the essay about Andrea’s childhood crush — including the line, “the truth is, I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them” — felt painfully familiar. (n+1)
  • Pretty much every time I go out with friends these days, I order a cheeseburger if the establishment has one; cheeseburgers — particularly greasy, roadside cheeseburgers — are one thing I cannot reliably make at home. This piece made me double my efforts. Fuck I’ve been missing California this month. (Kaleb Horton)
  • “Maybe I’ve been so angry, on a subliminal level, for so long, that the release of even a fraction of that anger feels like a humid sky opening in rain.” On Kamala Harris. (The Sword and the Sandwich)