I have spent a great deal of my life trying to optimise my encounters with other people. The clinical term for what I thought I was doing is self-regulation: the ability to monitor and control your attention, thoughts, emotions and behaviours in pursuit of your goals.While I would externally scoff at the idea we could optimise ourselves to this degree, internally, it was basically my modus operandi. I thought it was an admirable trait, something that made me a kind of Kantian King, while other people, so led by their emotions, are but mere mortals.
As an early 20s lost kid whose number one priority was to secure myself as the rightful heir of a specific male gaze (that uniquely brutal mix of veiled chauvinism and South Park-inspired cynicism), I would walk into parties like a vulnerable animal approaching a watering hole. Not because I wanted to be there, but because like that animal, I needed something from it and I didn’t know where else to go. I would scan the room in search of the leader, and spend the night figuring out what he wanted, how I could get his attention. I would do jumping jacks to secure it, and spend the journey replaying every moment I ‘nailed it’. It was never a romantic thing, and it didn’t even need to be a man; it could be a woman, a boss, or someone in the supermarket. It was just that my idea of socialising meant figuring out what someone wanted and then presenting myself as it. I lived inside an image of myself in your head, and did everything I could to ensure it was a good one. This, I thought, was being a ‘cool girl’.
Here is what I did not understand then: I couldn’t have been regulating myself because there was no self to regulate in those moments. What I was actually doing was regulating my proximity to the other. I recently listened to an interview with the psychoanalyst Darien Leader, who spoke about the strange ways we use our hands to regulate the other (think smoking, gesturing, nervous reaching, etc.) with the idea being that what looks like private self-soothing is actually a way of managing the relational field around us. In a sense, all of that anticipating and curating: it was never about me. It was about keeping you at exactly the right distance, because if I fail and if you don’t like me, well, you don’t know me. I just didn’t get the character right.
And like any system running on borrowed power, it would eventually cut out. My pissed-off self never sent a warning either; it would get me wasted at the party and then have me announce, loudly, that I think everyone is actually stupid (I don’t). It would arrive as a panic attack in a bathroom, or as the brunch I swore I would make that I slept straight through, or the deadline I promised on a Sunday night with great sincerity and then missed completely. Every catastrophic flare-up was the same thing: the return of everything I had pushed beneath the performance, surfacing with the fury of something that knew it didn’t have long before I’d push it back down again.
I did this dance for so long because figuring out what others wanted from me was easier than sitting with what I might actually want myself. Easier, too, to believe I could one day become a perfect version of myself than to face the person I already was. The self-regulation industry is happy to indulge this; it promises a frictionless, perfected self but never mentions that the self being perfected is almost always assembled in relation to someone else’s gaze, with a promised sense of safety perpetually just out of reach. It capitalises on our fear that we are truly, truly unlovable, but tells us we never have to confront this, so long as we remain perfectly controlled creatures.
The ways I other-regulate now are things I spent years berating myself for: I play with my hair in strange ways, I disappoint people, and I speak in rambles. I no longer look like the person that the image of me in your head depends on, and as such, have no idea what you think of me anymore. I have no idea if that is good. But I am no longer panicking in bathrooms, and I’m not calling anyone stupid. I’ll take it.
Written by Molly Fitz