Express yourself!
What are the basic drives of humanity? What gets us up in the morning, gets the juices flowing and steers our behavior through the day? Money? Power? Sex? Meaning? Status? Simple survival? Those are all renowned, and you can feel them surging through your life and the society around you, but I would like to propose one more that pretty much flies under the radar: personal expression.
As used every day, “express” is a verb for saying something, and an “expression” is the thing said. But think of how far it goes. Consider the etymology of this simple idea: “ex” (out) + “press”, or push. To “push out.”
When we say “express”, we’re not just talking about putting something into words. We’re talking about taking something from inside ourselves, and pushing it out into the world. Again, sounds simple — until you think about it.
There aren’t many experiences more joyful than sitting across from another person, locked in rapport; words, ideas, and feelings springing forth and being received warmly and knowingly by the other. Knowing the elation of understanding and being understood, of the conviction that something alive in you now lives in them, and feeling the other person’s joy at being understood by you. The heart of that experience is the height of personal expression: making us feel alive.
If you’ve successfully “expressed” something — a desire, a thought, a feeling — you’ve taken something from inside your own head and brought it to life inside the head of another person. You’ve affected the world, and that effect is your own. Those effects can be trivial in scale and unimportant to the world (“I’ll pay with a credit card”), but the possibilities are endless, both to the world and the person so expressing.
Once we think of personal expression as the act of having our effect on the world, we start to realize how important it is to have such expressions, such personal effects on the world at large--and, conversely, how empty, lonely, and tragic is the life that slips by without touching anything.
When we’re suffering, we can go it alone, but if we’re lucky, and we have someone to share our misery with (literally, commiseration), how much solace do we get from the realization that a friend has found space in their head and heart for what was previously yours alone?
How much of our personal life revolves around our presentation in the world, defining who we are, for all the world to see? Matters of grooming aren’t just practical, they also tell the world that you’re a well-groomed person. Car ownership, bumper stickers, T-shirt slogans, hair style, and clothing choices in general only mean anything because they say something about the bearer — fostering an impression in others corresponding to the bearer’s expression. We want people to have a particular impression of us: of our personalities, of our charity, of our probity. We manage our reputations even among people who don’t have the slightest practical importance in our lives. Why? Because we want to have ourselves out there in the form that expresses who we are (or aspire to be).
How much of our social media presence is about presentation? From selfies in alluring locations to virtue signaling to staging bookshelves for Zoom calls, we spend much of the day trying to get the right ideas about ourselves into the heads of others.
What drives writers to toil on their expressions, but the goal of having their feelings, their ideas, find life in others out there?
What is art, but the willful act of taking something inside and “pushing it out” into the world — something that uniquely expresses its creator? Art, though its countless expressions, finally comes down to a simple message: “Here I am. I made this. I am real.” Even simple craftwork: if the craftsperson cares at all, they care that the object being crafted reflects the person who made it.
Of course our genes dictate that we reproduce, but once we have children, how many parents resist the urge to mold them in their image, with their values, to do things the way they do them?
What is power, but the act of forcibly bending the rest of the world to our idea of the way things should be? What could be a more tangible expression of who we are than imposing our will on the world? Even climbing to an executive position or running for an elective office is largely about getting some part of the world to see you in a particular way.
You can even see the call to expression behind behavior that seems to serve that need, but really only makes a mockery of it. How many social media feeds are tailored to presenting someone’s carefully curated version of themselves, the person they wish other people would see? Aren’t online phenomena like virtue signaling and Twitter mobs really about asserting a moral, upright picture of oneself in the world? And isn’t whole idea of status symbols, from cell phones to Macmansions to monster trucks, presenting an enhanced version of ourselves?
There’s an old essay by Lester Bangs that perfectly expresses (as it were) this distinction between authentic expression and its fake, performative corruption, in the difference between style and fashion. In Bangs’s formulation, style is adopted by an individual as an expression of who they are. By contrast, fashion comes top-down, from the group; conforming to fashion signals that one is a member in good standing of that group. Bangs called that the difference between originality and fascism. I call it the difference between genuinely engaging with a basic need, and just gesturing in that direction in a way that only frustrates the very desire it claims to serve. Junk food for the heart.
Coming to terms with what personal expression is really all about, and how many forms it takes, I’ve found myself viewing the world and people’s role in it through a particular kind of glasses. I’ve been wearing those glasses for a while now, and they’ve convinced me that the drive to express oneself, by any means necessary, is one of the fundamental imperatives of the human animal: right up there with the need for sustenance, comfort, and transcendence. It saturates our existence. The flow of expression, of people interacting over who they really are, is as central in the human, social sphere as the flow of money is in the economic one.
Try those glasses on, and see what you think. How many things would you stop doing if there was no one to see/hear you do it? How much of what you do is about pushing out something of yourself into the world? If that’s the goal, how well do your choices serve that goal? How many of the actions of others around you are all about expressing themselves? Are they fooling themselves about what those actions are really about? Where can you spot the urge for self-expression operating in the world at large? What is the effect when a person strives to present an aspirational or otherwise untrue version of his or her self?
The isolation imposed by COVID offers a unique chance to look at our personal expressions anew, to question how well each one actually serves the goal of putting ourselves out there.
