How Should a Person Be?

by Sheila Heti

I noticed the way people dressed, the way they treated their lovers—in everyone, there was something to envy. You can admire anyone for being themselves.

I know that personality is just an invention of the news media. I know that character exists from the outside alone. I know that inside the body there’s just temperature. So how do you build your soul?

They like me for who I am, and I would rather be liked for who I appear to be, and for who I appear to be, to be who I am.

One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For the men, it’s pretty clear. That’s the reason you see them trying to talk themselves up all the time.

It’s time to stop asking questions of other people. It is time to just go into a cocoon and spin your soul.

Her first feeling every morning was shame about all the things wrong in the world that she wasn’t trying to fix. And so it embarrassed her when people remarked on her distinctive brushstrokes, or when people called her work beautiful, a word she claimed not to understand.

Sholem was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that’s not freedom! That’s control, or power. Whereas I think Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or to appear foolish. To not recognize that difference is a pretty big thing.”

“The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.”

gone. I saw him as just an old man staring at a girl—seeing her but seeing nothing. He didn’t know my insides. There was something wrong inside me, something ugly, which I didn’t want anyone to see, which would contaminate everything I would ever do.

What power a girl can have over a boy, to make him write such things! And what power a boy can have over a girl, to make her believe he has seen her fate. We don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.

A fear can feel like a premonition, and so it was with me; before marrying, and once married, I never imagined the happy years that he and I might share. What I felt instead was dread—helpless before our marriage’s inevitable end.

I felt like I was the tin man, the lion, and the scarecrow in one: I could not feel my heart, I had no courage, I could not use my brain.

Living in that house with my husband, I could not escape my every mistake; the walls were permanently scuffed with all the dark marks I had made while foolishly living. All I saw were the smudges, prominently there on what otherwise would have been a pure white wall.

The whipping about in the waves that had propelled me into my husband’s arms, through our marriage, then suddenly away from him, had died down; the sea was calm and rolled back. I stood up on the sand and looked about me. I was alone, and I was free.

I knew that from then on I would have to make decisions without any footprints in the sand to follow, without any hand guiding my path. There would be no telling what would lead to what. I would have to use my judgment—not just my intuition.

Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human. Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it’s not—it’s luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.

But life isn’t only where things are exciting; it’s where things feel hard and stagnant, too. And arguing for a pure act that doesn’t have a product in the end—well, there’s two things there: one is there’s not a concern for making a living; and second is there’s not a concern with working to the end and winding up with something solid.

In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world!

They must work—without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked. And I don’t mean work for its own sake, but they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process.

If they can’t be happy, let them at least be unhappy—really, really unhappy for once, and then they might become truly human.

Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.”

What would our punishment—for conceiving of things wrong—be? Life is not like dancing while a cowboy shoots at your feet!

Then I woke the next morning, thankful I wasn’t high. I will give up pot because it makes me paranoid. But I will stay close to God because he makes me paranoid.

I don’t want 00:00:00 anymore. It is banal. Yet in the pitch-perfect moments of life, I say to myself that I have followed my rules wisely, and that the surge of sublimity that flows within me is the gods’ reward.

You’re a charlatan. You love everything you were ever given.

I am not thinking of the one who said that in order to gain life, you have to lose it. If I lose it, I will be like the earth spinning off its axis into infinity, and who knows, without being something I can gaze at and admire, if I will ever find my way back. But I can only imagine what would happen to all the stuff of the earth if the earth was to spin off its axis. I think trees would crash into cars, but I don’t know enough science to say.

you know, the world is tremendously unfair, and it shouldn’t be that unfair for the vast majority of people.

I like boring people. I think it’s a virtue. People should be a little bored.

The moon was out and full, and everything was shivering in the moon’s silvery light. I thought about nature, and that I was in nature, and then I said to myself, You are nature.

cheating. It is cheating to treat oneself as an object, or as an image to tend to, or as an icon.

I know better than to let my life crumble around me just because somewhere inside me I am without a soul. For I sold it. And I don’t remember to whom. Or why. Or when.

There are people whose learning is so great, they seem to inhabit a different realm of species-hood entirely. Somehow, they appear untroubled by the nullness. They are filled up with history and legends and beautiful poetry and all the gestures of all the great people down through time.

“So you see, I’m really leery of these self-improvement seminars where you try to make yourself better and better. We probably need to suffer in order to . . . well, in order to break the spells.”

Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head.

“If we saw ourselves in realistic proportions—how tiny we are, and how little ability we have to avoid the suffering that’s an inevitable part of life—maybe we would be too discouraged to survive.”

I wanted a day without morning or evening. I wanted a day of rest.

I did value Margaux, but only now did I understand something I had not before: Margaux was not like the stars in the sky. There was only one Margaux—not Margauxs scattered everywhere, all throughout the darkness. If there was only one of her, there was not going to be a second one. Yet in some strange way, somewhere inside me, I had always believed that if I lost Margaux, I could go out and find another Margaux.

But I had never wanted to be one person, or even believed that I was one, so I had never considered the true singularity of anyone else.

The gravedigger said to himself, alone, “Not everyone can be a gravedigger. You have to make a neat job of it. I met a man once. He dug ditches. He wanted to see a grave. He was impressed when he saw me digging this way, how straight and deep it was. I told him: It has to be. A human body is going in this grave.”