Yeah, No. Not Happening.

by Karen Karbo

  During those years, I was very aware of watching myself, of containing two women. The Surveyor made sure the Surveyed appeared to be cheerful, fun-loving, and up for anything! The Surveyed attended class, dutifully partied, developed obligatory crushes on boys whose last names she never bothered learning. The Surveyor swung between feeling guilty that she’d killed her mother because she was such a disappointment, and rage that her mother, so frustrated at having to deal with a girl who could not, would not, improve herself, had no recourse but to manifest an aggressive brain tumor and try her luck in the next world.

  To the therapist I saw fifteen years later, I would describe that time as if I were living inside a glass tube. I could see people but couldn’t touch them. They could see me but didn’t try to touch me. Decades later I came upon a more perfect description. Heidi Julavits, writing in her memoir The Folded Clock, described her experience at a prestigious writing retreat in Italy. One day, she ventured out to see Piero’s Madonna. The contemplation of the Madonna, according to the “head pilgrim” on the visit, could change the outcome of your life. But the painting was difficult to see beneath not one but two layers of glass, like “trying to see a jam jar inside of an aquarium,” a description that Julavits then used to describe her time at the retreat, which she had been unable to enjoy.

  I gasped when I read that description. That was me. I had been inside that jam jar, inside that aquarium. Once, I got stupid drunk and went with a Sigma Chi to his bedroom. He didn’t touch me. I walked on a Mexican beach at midnight with a guy I’d met in a bar. I hitchhiked in Morocco. In Marrakesh, I went back with a guy to his room at 2:00 a.m. We slept side by side in his bed like siblings. Nothing bad happened. Nothing good happened. My guardian angel was working overtime, but while I was engaging in this stupid risky behavior, I felt safe, because I could feel people distancing themselves from me.

  No matter how hard the Surveyor worked to improve the Surveyed in those days (fad diets, aerobics, weekly face masks, a deep investigation into the best mascara), I remained unlikable. Or that was how it seemed to me then, thus proving that once again, my mother had been right. Much later, I would realize that we were all just kids, and no one knew what to say to someone who’d suffered such a horrifying loss.

  Kathryn Schulz, writing in New York magazine in 2013, describes this same bifurcated self: “Let us call it the master theory of self-help. It goes like this: somewhere below or above or beyond the part of you that is struggling with weight loss or procrastination or whatever your particular problem might be, there is another part of you that is immune to that problem and capable of solving it for the rest of you. In other words, this master theory is fundamentally dualist. It posits, at a minimum, two selves: one that needs a kick in the ass and one that is capable of kicking.”

  The Surveyed is the one who needs the kick in the ass, and the Surveyor is the one to do it. But the Surveyed is someone we’ve manufactured, according to the female ideal of the time, and the one who becomes our best self, our imaginary beloved. Our Surveyor is most likely to be closer to our true, unvarnished self.

  I imagine serious, competent Surveyor Karen hard at work in black T-shirt, baggy jeans, yellow reflective vest, and orange hard hat, gazing through her telescopic machine at shiny, people-pleasing Surveyed Karen. The jeans worn by Surveyed Karen are flattering, overthought, and overpriced, incorporating some sort of trademarked butt-lifting, tummy-flattening technology. Her black blouse is silky, figure-defining while also providing discreet coverage for her much-despised armpit fat. Her hair has been dyed, shampooed, conditioned, treated with a hair mask to encourage shine, air-dried, and tossed like a salad with an expensive tonic designed to preserve her natural waves. (It costs $250 every six weeks.) She wears a foundation that is supposed to give her skin a dewy sheen. An expensive concealer hides her age spots but not her freckles. The aesthetician who gives her monthly facials assured her that freckles are “young-ifying.” Surveyed is wearing a maximizing lip-plumping lip gloss in raspberry. She smiles, even when she is alone; Surveyor has done research, educating Surveyed in the power of smiling, the way it puts you in a better mood, while also toning the muscles of the face.

  Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is defined as an obsessive preoccupation with some aspect of our bodies—hair, skin, nose, chest, and stomach are most common. BDD entered the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987 and is believed to be on the obsessive-compulsive disorder spectrum. It’s been described as “the distress of imagined ugliness.” Those who suffer from BDD focus on their perceived flaws for much of their waking hours. Muscle dysmorphia, suffered mostly by men, is the excessive belief that your body is too underdeveloped and skinny. It entered the DSM in 2013, as a subcategory of BDD.

  I’d like to suggest a new addition to the dysmorphia family: best-self dysmorphia. The primary symptom of best-self dysmorphia disorder (BSDD) is the constant feeling that however “good” we are, we are never enough. The Surveyor, always chasing the best self, is never satisfied with the achievements of the Surveyed.

  Whatever our goals, they could be better. If we’ve achieved those goals, we realize they should have been bigger and more ambitious. Whatever our mood, it could be more pleasant. However productive we are, we could be more productive. Our spiritual practice could be more spiritual. Our relationships could be more relation-y. Our thoughts could be more focused and positive, because the Universe is always listening, so every musing must always be intentional and pure of heart, or we risk not receiving the things we feel we need to make us happy.

  Do not mistake BSDD with the healthy human desire to take care of ourselves and do the things necessary to maintain a healthy body. I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t eat right, exercise, take time to rest and reflect, and all the other things I know you already know are good for you. I’m also all for self-actualization: indeed, learning what to say yes to, and what to say fuck it all about, is a component of self-growth.

  BSDD is not self-actualization, though it often wears it as a disguise. BSDD is that crazy-making conviction that no matter what you’ve achieved, how much you’re loved, how much you have, you need to be doing more, or something different, to assure continued achievement, love, acquisition, and happiness. The food on the BSDD sufferer’s plate could always be greener and leaner. If it was once considered an inedible noxious weed but has now been revealed to be a superfood, she could not be happier. BSDD also features a strong component of body dissatisfaction. She could always be fitter, eat better, take better care of her skin, have more hair where she’s supposed to have more hair and less hair where she’s supposed to have less, and look chic rather than misguided in those giant baggy linen dresses that are currently all the rage.

  My friend Maggie suffers from BSDD tendencies, and she’s the first to admit it. Maggie has a functional marriage, a job in tech she likes well enough, and a nice house in a nice neighborhood. Her husband is not preoccupied by his phone, cooks a few nights a week, and remembers all the important anniversaries. The house has a walk-in pantry and a sunroom surrounded by fig trees. She wants for nothing that any of us who love her can see; many people do love her, and to my knowledge no one thinks she needs to be better than she already is. She tends to finish your sentences, drinks too much and gets weepy three days after her nutty mother visits, borrows books then claims they were hers to start with, and brags too much about how woke her son is compared to other sons. In short: her best self is her real self and is just as flawed as the rest of us, and no one holds it against her.

  She is, however, obsessed with her weight, which is average for her height. Still, she felt she could lose twenty pounds. She yearned to fit into a pair of cutoffs she found in a box in the attic that she wore when she was eleven, or some crazy-ass nonsense. She went paleo and lost twenty pounds. She became slightly mad with her rapid weight loss (as one does), started running, upped her daily mileage, then blew out her knee. During her recovery, she discovered
salted caramel ice cream and a Netflix show with seven or eight seasons and gained it all back. She was once again at her average weight, and back to being unable to fit into the clothes she wore as a tween. To manage her self-loathing, she tried meditation, then missed a few mornings, then felt guilty. She felt guilty for feeling guilty. It’s meditation, not trauma surgery, she tried to tell herself. She descended into a bad period of lacerating self-hatred.

  There was no convincing her that anyone who has an active life risks getting injured. Bad stuff happens. And when it does, sometimes we just freak out and find comfort where we can. We retreat to a place that feels good, even if it’s not good for us, and lick our wounds. Or an ice-cream cone. It’s frustrating, but it doesn’t merit the searing self-loathing, self-doubt, and despair we all feel when we’ve fallen off our best self–seeking wagon.

  Emma, another friend, is trying to get pregnant. Every month, when her period comes, she thinks: if I would just be able to quit coffee, wine, sugar, gluten, and dairy, and be mindful and get more exercise, more sleep, and drink more water, and focus on empowering my lady plumbing to get with it, I would get pregnant. She believes in the power of the mind-body connection, and when she feels stuck in her head (all the time; like so many of us she’s strapped to her laptop and phone), she feels like she’s falling down on the job. She’s aware that she’s trying to have agency over something beyond her control, but it’s also been drilled into her that everything is her responsibility. She believes the mind-body connection isn’t a democracy, but a dictatorship, where the mind gives the orders. To accept there is sometimes plain old bad luck, or situations over which we have no control, is tantamount to quitting. And Emma’s best self doesn’t quit.

  She knows she’s being hard on herself, but to give up on being an improved version of herself, in Emma’s mind—in so many of our minds—is synonymous with being a failure. “I know I should be the woman who juices and goes to yoga, declutters, and has a growing 401(k), but instead I wind up watching TV and eating a doughnut,” she says. In her voice, you can hear her disappointment and despair. Emma is a fantastic baker and could easily open a business selling one thing: her mouthwatering apple spice cinnamon doughnuts. For the record, if those are the doughnuts she’s eating, it makes complete sense. She would be insane not to sit around eating those doughnuts and binge-watching Stranger Things.

  The last time I talked to Emma she had just attended a women’s summit sponsored by Princeton, her alma mater. All the featured speakers and keynotes, women at the top of their game in the top of their fields, women who’ve launched companies, litigated landmark cases, patented forward-thinking technology that will save the planet, married well, birthed well, are raising handsome and exemplary children, manage to maintain homes with white sofas and black dogs, all while rocking artfully torn size 2 skinny jeans and a cashmere sweater, felt they didn’t measure up. Over goblets of dry rosé, they talked about feeling like frauds, and about all the ways in which they still were not doing their best.

  Emma said, “Isn’t that horrifying? I mean, all those accomplished women who still think they’re not good enough.”

  “Yeah, you’re one of them,” I said with love.

  “Fuck off, so are you,” she said. (Also with love.)

  She was right, of course.

  Best self is a creation, as we’ve established. Best self is a collaboration between the culture and our Surveyor. The culture makes its impossible demands, always shifting with the times, and the Surveyor presses the Surveyed to keep up.

  Culture says, “Your hair may be straight, but it isn’t silky enough.” Surveyor tells Surveyed, “You should get a keratin treatment, stat!” Culture says, “You may be thin, but do you wear a size 0?” Surveyor tells Surveyed, “You should cut out bananas. They’re the most fattening fruit. Also, you should up your workout from forty-five minutes a day to ninety.” Culture asks, “Are you making sure you are available to tend to everyone in your family 24/7, with a smile on your chemically peeled face?” Surveyor tells Surveyed, “You should get better at time management and find some happy-all-the-time mantra to keep resentment at bay.”

  Best self is a very powerful-seeming illusion. The iconic scene in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Lion finally reach the Emerald City and are granted an audience with the Wizard is an apt metaphor for seeing best self for who it is. Dorothy et al. stand trembling in the chamber before the Great Oz. His disembodied alien-looking head scowls at them from between pillars of fire. He roars and blusters, until Toto trots over and pulls aside a curtain, revealing the Wizard to be a harmless geezer pulling levers and shouting into a microphone. His power is pure sham.

  What happens when we decide this crazy, futile pursuit of our best self isn’t worth it anymore? Who are we when we say we’re done with all that, and the world is going to have to accept us as we are? Who are we when we’ve had enough, and we’re done playing by the rules, and the Surveyor stops ordering the Surveyed around, and they join forces?

  The Self You Know to Be True in This Moment emerges. I’m going to call her True Self, to avoid using the completely out of control acronym, SYKTBTITM. It isn’t a piece of cake to discern our True Self. Great thinkers since antiquity have spent entire lifetimes trying to define it. “I think, therefore I am,” seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes decided, sounding not at all certain. David Hume, tackling the definition a century later, declared the self to be a bundle of perceptions, “like links in a chain.” (C+ effort, Mr. Hume.) Eastern thinkers sidestepped the definition and opted for aphorisms: “Knowing others is wisdom,” wrote Lao Tzu in the fourth century BC. “Knowing yourself is enlightenment.”

  True Self, as I call her, is someone who has an inkling of her character traits, habits and behaviors, values and beliefs, personal preferences and tastes. There were times in my life when I was in such hot pursuit of best self, I lost track of what these qualities might be. Or worse, I thought they didn’t matter. I thought True Self could be easily dismissed. I didn’t respect her. I thought she was a nuisance, with her intelligence, her tendency to scoff at things over which other girls swooned, her love of mockery and practical jokes, her disinclination to be accommodating or pleasant.

  Unlike best self, which is largely performative and presentational, True Self does not prioritize the way she is perceived by others. True Self dives in and responds, moment by moment, to what is going on around her and learns more about herself by the nature of these interactions. Mixing it up with other humans, diving wholeheartedly into new experiences, traveling—these are activities that reveal ourselves to ourselves.

  To throw your lot in with True Self is to choose self-respect over the approval of others. I won’t pretend that it doesn’t take courage. As Joan Didion wrote in her 1961 Vogue essay “Self-Respect: Its Source, Its Power”: “. . . people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.” The chief negotiable virtue for women, it seems to me, is convincing ourselves we’re merely being flexible and open-minded when we succumb to the notion that consumer culture knows better about what it means to be a woman in the world than we do. Didion then goes on to say that character is the willingness to accept responsibility for our own life; relating it to self-improvement, we might extend that to mean responsibility for accepting our True Selves.

  In 1999, when my dad was dying of lung cancer, I took care of him. I adored my dad, but my love for him didn’t prevent my being the worst caretaker on earth. I would give him his meds, change his diaper with my eyes closed, then lock myself in the bathroom and weep. Sometimes, I heard him call for me, but I stayed in the bathroom, reading. I lived on Jelly Belly jelly beans and tortilla chips. I lost his dachshund.* One hot afternoon I thought my dad was already dead. I immediately called his hospice nurse to come pronounc
e it. He had told me the first thing I should do after he passed was to take the gold braided ring he wore on his little finger, which had belonged to his mother, and her mother before that. A true family heirloom. I was sweating, shaking, and weeping as I tried to wrench it off his finger. The commotion woke him up. He hollered, “What in the hell is going on?”

  Not my finest hour. And yet, my True Self at her best. I did what I thought I had to do, even if I did it inexpertly and with fear and trembling. I was neither poised, nor thinking happy thoughts. I was a wreck of greasy hair, a zitty chin, and coffee-stained sweatpants. I was so disastrously imperfect in that moment, and yet when my father finally did die, and I was able to remove his ring and slip it on my own finger, I felt I had done my best. There were no wouldas, couldas, shouldas. I was simply sad.

  A thought experiment: what would your life look like if you were somehow able to arrive at the ever-receding mirage of the Ideal Female? Ta-da! Your body is now the perfect size and shape—not for you, but as judged by others. Your habits are impeccable. You have successfully embraced everything you’ve wanted to successfully embrace. You are productive, organized, and have mastered positive visualization. Now that you are your best self, what happens? Do you land the job or partner of your dreams? Are you promoted or proposed to? Do people love you more? Are parades held in your honor?

  There is a catch: you must bid farewell to True Self. Everything you know to be true about who you are, all the imperfect, average, and less-than-culturally-approved habits, thoughts, and behaviors, is no more. True You, who you’ve suspected is holding you back from being Best You, has left the building.