Matthew Jordan's Reviews > On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy

Without a doubt the most important book I've ever read about psychotherapy, feelings, finding yourself, growth. The whole book is basically a meditation of what it means to "be yourself". It sounds like simple advice, but it's wickedly complicated. We do not have one fixed "self" we can simply "be". And even if we did, we are always changing, so "be yourself" is actually about hitting a moving target. And can we not change ourselves? If I surround myself with different people, and start reading different books, will I not find myself becoming a different self, or at least, find certain parts of myself coming to the fore that might not get expressed in other contexts?

So, what does it mean to "be yourself"? I've been thinking about it like this: simply embrace what I actually want and like. Whenever possible, I should try to separate my motivations from the myriad other factors influencing my thoughts and behaviour: other people's expectations, cultural norms, feelings of jealousy. The good life, says Rogers, comes from confronting your own actual desires, even if those desires are ugly and you do not yourself endorse them, and recognizing that that's who you are. Deeply understanding your wants and needs is the only place from which you can actually change or grow.

This is not easy to do. There are a number of reasons why. First off, there is often a clash between what I want to want and what I actually want. When there's pizza in front of you, and you say "that pizza looks hella yummy", your hungry ass actually wants to eat pizza. There's no ambiguity there. But when you're walking around a stack of classical books and say "I want to dig into the canon and study all the important ancient texts", you're describing an aspiration. You wish you could sit your literate ass down and read these books all day, but if you dig deep down, you don't actually want this, moment-by-moment. You might get distracted, or bored, or suddenly want something else, like scrolling on social media or hanging out with friends. Maybe you're jealous of the people who can sit down and read the Epic of Gilgamesh in one sitting, but that ain't you. That ain't most of us.

This realization was huge for me. There are some books I wish I wanted to read, or some styles of music I wish I wanted to play, or some writing I wish I wanted to do, but if I really look deep down, I simply don't want to actually do those things. I want to mostly read simple books that are tailored to my current interests, and play funk music, and write Goodreads book reviews. I can claim to want other stuff, but if I look at what I do, it's clear what I actually want. It's a real "if he wanted to, he would have" situation. The best way to know what a person wants to do is simply look at what they actually repeatedly do. And instead of saying "ugh, I really wanted to read more ancient classics, but I failed and read a bunch of 21st century campus novels instead", it's very easy to reframe that as "I thought I wanted to read ancient classics, but I actually want to read 21st century campus novels, and I should embrace that."

The hard part is embracing my actual desires. Recognizing that the things I want to read, and write, and learn, are completely valid, and that I should just dive head-first into the things I actually want, rather than yearning for some set of things I need to force myself to want. This has happened to me on many occasions. I have tried so many times to make myself interested in drawing or dance, but my hands and feet simply do not comply. My hands and feet do, however, want to bike around and listen to audiobooks about oil barons. What it means to "be myself" is to recognize that I do not get to choose to want biking and barons, instead of wanting drawing and dancing. And that's great.

This also happens when I lose interest in something, but I don't realize I've lost interest. In undergrad I mostly studied math, but by my 4th year my interest (and aptitude) was rapidly waning. But I had spent the past four years planning for a life spent doing math, and assumed I would go to grad school for the subject. So here I was, sitting in math classes, no longer interested, but forcing myself to remain invested because I assumed that's what I'd wanted. I would wonder what was wrong with me. Maybe I'd lost my ability to focus? Maybe my work ethic had just gone down the drain? Nope. I was just failing to keep up with my own desires. Unbeknownst to myself, my central interest had in fact shifted to a different field (psychology), which I could have easily realized had I only paid attention to the fact that I was reading like two psychology books a week.

This is what Rogers means by "becoming a person". There is no endpoint here. You are never the fixed self you will be forever. It's a constant process of becoming—a lifelong process of understanding how past experience has shaped you and of keeping up with the person you are now becoming through your present action.

The cool thing about this book is that it also doubled for me as a theory of creativity. I think the ultimate act of creative expression is simply being yourself. The most creative people I know are actually just deeply in touch with their own taste, their own feelings, their own aesthetic desires and preferences, their own style, and then turn that into an artifact.

It took me a very, very long time to realize this, but a few things really locked it in for me. The first was seeing this website by my friend Avi, who launched his video game studio earlier this year: https://magiccircle.studio/. I saw this website and just felt this overwhelming sense: "this website *is* Avi." He had somehow taken his inner gestalt and translated it into an external artifact (in this case a website). He's done it in a style that was uniquely his. That right there, that's creativity.

The second key thing was this podcast interview between John Mayer and Cory Wong (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...), where they both talk about finding their artistic voice. Cory and John both repeatedly make the point that, simply due to the anatomy of their fingers and the way they approach the guitar, they both cannot help but sound a particular way when they play. Becoming an artist, they say, is about learning how to play in this way—the way that you cannot help but play—and turning it into a unique style. Instead of thinking about how you can sound more like your heroes, ask, "how can I sound more like myself"? (At one point, John Mayer says that he will play stuff on guitar and think "ugh, that's pretty unoriginal, just sounds John Mayer", and then has to remind himself that he himself is John Mayer. This dude cannot help but play like himself.) This is deeply related to the idea of "becoming a person". Becoming an artist is about embracing how you actually sound, instead of trying to sound like someone else; becoming a person is about embracing your actual desires, instead of worrying about the things you wish you felt.

This whole process requires an unbelievably, almost egregious, amount of self-confidence. You need to look at your blank canvas, staring at your personal style of painting, and have the audacity to say, "wait, real artists don’t paint like that, but I suppose I do”, and then believe in yourself enough to put that out into the world. That’s what makes you a real artist.

It dawned on me while thinking about this that people are often not the best judges of which of their own art is actually good or not. I remember watching the Long Pond Studio Sessions and hearing Jack Antonoff saying that his favorite song off the record was Mirrorball. Taylor Swift herself did not know that All Too Well would be a hit. This is crazy to me. But on reflection, it makes total sense. When you’re a totally singular artist, when you’ve found your artistic voice, you’re operating completely in your own realm. There’s no benchmark anymore. You’re not acting according to anyone else’s standard but your own. So of course you won’t know which of your works will actually resonate with fans or not. If you could know that in advance, you would start making music for the purpose of it being enjoyed by fans, and it would lose all of its integrity.

In other words, you don’t get to decide what you’ll be recognized for. All you can do is find your style, find your voice, and be prolific. It’s often up to other people to tell you what your actual talents are. Personally, I find that the stuff that comes super easy to me, the stuff that doesn’t even feel like “work”, is the stuff other people are often impressed by or encourage me to do more. It’s a very strange feeling. But of course it makes sense. The artist cannot also be an art critic. In the words I heard the novelist Jonathan Cohen say on a podcast, “an elephant cannot be a zoologist.”

I happened to be thinking about this idea when I read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Harry’s peers insist he needs to teach them Defense Against the Dark Arts because he’s so gifted at it. After all, he’s defeated Voldemort and other dark wizards multiple times in battle. Harry insists those victories were just luck, and that he has no special aptitude. But his friends insist that this is his central talent. This is how it works to learn you’re good at something. You don’t know you’re good at it, you just know that you never had to work that hard to master it, and so it feels like luck. It won’t feel like “work”, but it just might be the most important thing you can do. In the words of another quote I heard on a podcast but can no longer attribute, “find what you’re good at, then do that on purpose.” Boy is that hard. [Edit: I found the quote, and it's even better than I thought! "Find out who you are and do it on purpose" – Dolly Parton. Unreal.]

The difficulty of embracing your own style really hit home for me when I was teaching university courses in 2020. My students had to write weekly reflections on the text that we read in class, and I insisted that they try to write about their actual thoughts and opinions, rather than merely summarizing the text. I know what the text says. It’s not interesting for me to read an essay about what the text says. What is interesting, I tell my students, is their reactions and actual thoughts. They may not be experts on the subject material we talk about in class (in this case, the history of science), but they are the world’s leading authorities on one subject: their own experience. If you can lucidly and thoughtfully communicate your own experience, you are by definition saying something original, because no one else is you.

Again, this is a simple idea, but it was basically impossible to apply in practice. My students had years of experience regurgitating ideas and almost no experience reflecting on their own reactions to the text. They would ask me whether I was looking for criticisms, or analysis, or summaries, and I would tell them: “no, I am looking for you to actually just honestly, genuinely tell me what this text made you think about. Maybe you hated it. Maybe it made you think about some completely unrelated thing that has nothing to do with the material. That’s ok.” The thing I was trying to convey is that this is what the professionals are doing. “Real” writers and philosophers are not in the business of summarizing text for a professor. They’re in the business of being super in touch with, and very much trusting, their own experiences and insights, and refining the vocabulary to convey those experiences and insights to others. In other words, they are in the business of being themselves.

This was a massive revelation for me. When I myself was a student, I was very good at citing what famous authors would say about the subject matter. I could quote Marx or John Locke out the wazoo. “Who am I”, I would think, “to opine on this material? I am a lowly undergraduate student. I am 20 years old. My opinions do not matter. You know whose opinions matter? People from the past who are venerated and respected and whose ideas form the basis for our culture and society.” In some sense, this is obviously true. But imagine saying this to Marx and Locke. Then they would have never become Marx and Locke! They’d just be experts at quoting their predecessors and would never have dared trust their own naive opinions. And what fun would that be? The whole point of the Great Conversation is to read the works of the past and then articulate how they resonate in the present. That’s what I want my students to do, and that’s what I hope I’m doing right now.

I now feel like high schools do an immense disservice by teaching students about plot, character, themes, symbols, etc., and never giving students the space to just react to media, without any frameworks. I almost feel that the latter is actually a prerequisite to being able to analyze anything in a rigorous way. This only clicked for me a few years ago, listening to the podcast Very Bad Wizards. The hosts talked about the movies they watched in a way that was totally new to me. There were no “analytic tools” at play, at least not explicitly. They didn’t talk about cinematography for the sake of talking about cinematography. They talked about what moved them. What bothered them. Which characters they found endearing and which they found annoying. In other words, they just talked about their actual experience of taking in this movie. And it was SO MUCH BETTER than any assignment version of the same exercise. I now feel that being able to express your own authentic reactions is a prerequisite for the frameworks we learn in high school. How are you supposed to say anything interesting about plot if you don’t even know whether you liked the plot in the first place? Come ON!

One final set of thoughts before wrapping up. I’ve been thinking a bunch about the relationship between being yourself, finding your creative voice, and avoiding competition. I realized earlier this year that I really, really dislike competition. I haven’t really sought out competitive activities, and when I play sports, I’ve never been particularly motivated by winning. When I’m around competitive environments, I often try to act as the ambassador of some other thing. Among the technologists, I am the local historian. Among the mathematicians, I’m the resident musician. Among the comedians, I’m an academic; among the academics, I’m a comedian.

Part of this, surely, is due to some kind of insecurity, and not wanting to be perceived as “one of them”. But I think a big part of it is avoiding competition. I never want to feel like I’m measuring up against others. I never want to engage in zero-sum thinking—thoughts like “only some small number of us are going to make it”. I never want to feel like I’m entering a race. I do want to feel like I’m pursuing my own authentic goals and have fun. Most people I know who participated in competitive music or sports as kids have quit those activities and grown to resent them. I don’t even know what it would mean for me to “quit” the piano, because I only ever play it when it’s fun for me.

I think there’s a relationship between this notion of avoiding competition and the idea of being yourself and finding your authentic voice. If you know your strengths and understand your unique vantage point, anything you say or build or create will be unique and original. That doesn’t necessarily mean that what you’re creating is good—as we saw before, that’s not up to you to decide—but it means that you’re avoiding competition, and competition is toxic. My goal is to focus ruthlessly on being myself, be open to learning what my strengths are through feedback from others, and avoid the temptation to enter crowded fields at all costs. If I focus on being myself, the notion of competition disappears.

One final note on this book: Carl Rogers has the most calming and self-assured authorial voice. He only speaks in "I" statements, which is actually quite unusual. He would never say "if you accept who you are, you can change"—it's only "when *I* accept who *I* am, then *I* can change". It's a pretty profound shift in perspective, and I found it rather moving.

Well, there you have it. These are my thoughts. This book clearly did a number on me, but I think I just happened to read it at a very particular time in my life when I was thinking a great deal about what it meant to pursue the things I wanted. I’ve since recommended the book to many friends, and everyone has taken their own nuggets of wisdom from it. But the central nugget of wisdom, sappy and sentimental though it may be, is this: you can only ever be yourself, so now’s the time to learn to love exactly who you are.