Today's musings are proudly (but humbly) brought to you be self-deprecation (I wanted to insert a link there to the Stuff White People Like page on Self-Deprecating Humour, but it turns out that it's a chapter in the book but not on the website). I was talking to someone recently who didn't seem to be entirely across the concept, and so I figured it might be rarer than I'd imagined? It always surprises me when this happens, but it's not as rare as I always seem to expect (I'm a slow learner that way).
It turns out, there's a part of the population who just genuinely don't seem to know what to do with self-deprecation, much like many more of us persistently mishandle compliments. Seriously, I am so bad at handling compliments you guys. When someone says "I like your hat" I always go "it's great, isn't it?!" before realising that you're supposed to be self-deprecating about it, even if it legitimately is a great hat, and you didn't make it, so you can hardly be all "nahhh", since then you're actually milliner-deprecating rather than self-deprecating. But if someone is like "you have nice eyes I go "Nonsense, shut up" even though actually I'm super pleased, because the habit of self-deprecation is too strong.
Even more than compliments, though, I don't know what to do with people who don't understand how self-deprecation works, who seem to think that "self-depreciating" (with an extra i) is what it is. Like saying "oh man, I couldn't run 100m to save my life!" actually reduces your value in some way, or like it's a big meaningful difficulty you're worried about. You know the ones, you say to them "Your writing is so neat! My notes always look like they were scratched by a chicken who's recently had a stroke!" and instead of going "pfft, only my good writing is like this!" or "you don't fool me, your writing's not at all bad!" or "heh, it's my superpower! Neatest running-writing in the west!", they offer to give you tips to get better, or explain that yes, their writing is so neat that it once singly handedly saved a child from drowning, and you should see how good their watercolours and use of a pencil is! Their chiaroscuro shading has been known to reduce grown men to tears. In fact, they were the only 4 year old in the state to be awarded a fully legal pen-licence, years ahead of their time! (For the record, I never actually got my pen licence, I've been using biros illegally since the start of year 5, when it was assumed we'd all managed to master basic handwriting in year 4. I hope Mr. Goodlet never finds out).
I know this is in a sense my fault for putting people in a situation where, if they take me entirely at my word, they will look (possibly just to me?) like a socially inept twit, but I do think that in general, this is something with which, critically low caffeine levels notwithstanding, you should be able to cope, unless you actually are a socially inept twit? It's not like it's reasonable for me to totally judge people on this (so I don't, many of my friends and acquaintances have their aspergesque days), but equally, it's not like this sort of thing should be as challenging as it apparently is.
I get particularly annoyed when people drop the ball on this and I know it's my own fault really. Meeting someone for the first time, or talking so someone you've seen around but never really spoken to, and who therefore doesn't know much about you is not, I should know by now, a good time to say things which might be misleading if misinterpreted. But my goodness. It drives me so up the wall when I tell an anecdote about the one time I stuffed up something I consider myself to be generally pretty good at (like the time I accidentally made the world's worst lasagne despite being a pretty fair cook generally, or any one of the numerous times I've totally failed to remember a crucial word despite generally being very chatty, for instance) and the person I'm talking to makes it clear that they now genuinely believe I can't cook a meal to save my life, or string a sentence together in company due to crippling shyness. I want to believe that the reason that this irks me so much is that I know it's really my own fault, so I get annoyed with myself, but I fear that maybe vanity is at work here, and maybe it just bugs me when people try to console me for being bad about something I'm actually smug about. I hope it isn't that, but I guess none of us is perfect, and all of us (me especially, perhaps), are a bit inclined to show off. I'm certainly guiltily aware that I do that more than I ought, which is unfair because I find it so infuriating in others.
This is particularly unfair of me in that sometimes I'm actually trying to mention (but make light of, so that the tone of voice etc is probably identical to the untrained ear) something that I actually am worried about being not very good at. I can see why "ha, I once burned a pudding so thoroughly that we had to have the curtains professionally cleaned after a fortnight of the smoky smell refusing to dissipate" and "gosh, I'm so bad at respiratory histories that I genuinely fear that I'll either fail the Long Case Exam or fluke it and then accidentally kill a patient through incompetence!" might seem like the same sort of thing, to someone who wasn't trained in the finer points of My Personal Conversational Peccadilloes. And that probably means I ought to do something about it (and also revise before my long case exam), but, much like me coming to a completely detailed understanding of the management pulmonary telangiectasia, it's not all that likely to happen.
Also, this makes me very bad at job interviews and presumably internet dating, and any other situation where you need to "sell yourself". I just have no idea how to say "I type pretty well" without feeling like I sound like a dick.
Worst of all (or reassuringly, depending on how you look at it?), I was talking to someone about this sort of thing today, someone who actually does a fair amount of job-interviewing, and he said that he's so used to self-deprecating-ness that when someone says something like "I have exceptional skills..." he's prejudiced against them, and less likely to hire because that does indeed sound like the statement of a complete dick. The problem with this is that I've always been taught that the solution to "I'm not sure how to sell myself" is "Don't think about it, just do it, just say 'I'm amazing' because how else will they know how amazingly right for this job you actually are?" so now I don't know what to think.
I'm totally sure I had another (doubtless excellent) point I was going to make about this, in another paragraph, but it's completely fallen out of my brain, possibly as a self-defence manouvre on the part of my subconscious, which knows I could happily blog for hours, but that I have to get up in less than 6 hours.
Hopefully whatever it was will come to me in the night, and I can tell you tomorrow, although if it does, the odds are good that it will turn out to have been oversold today, and may be an anti-climax (also I might never remember it!) so maybe don't hold your breath for that scintillating missing paragraph too vigourously?
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