You have to look for that thing inside you that you love and hold on to it dearly.
means being overly sensitive, not necessarily in the you-really-hurt-my-feelings sort of way but more in the I-feel-everythingand-everyone-right-now kind of way. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” the notoriously shy David Foster Wallace wrote about television as a refuge for the socially awkward. “Lonely people tend rather to be lonely because they decline to bear the emotional costs associated with being around other humans,” he wrote. “People affect them too strongly. But lonely people, home, alone, still crave sights and scenes.” That’s the introvert’s paradox: interest in other people that’s so genuine and pure, they become terrifying.
The world could definitely use some of this introverted sensitivity now. The same sensitivity that allows us introverts to think inward first before acting outward, that allows us to listen more than we talk, to feel what other people feel, to see equality as a non-negotiable value. Sensitivity and shyness used to be trendy back in the aught when Belle and Sebastian sounded revolutionary and Garden State’s Zach Braff and 500
Days of Summer’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt were the ideal male romantic leads, all that twee hard work became undone by a few elections and a bunch of fake social media posts.
But worry not, my shy brethren. Whatever happens in the outside world, we’re going to be fine. We have richly decorated inner worlds and they were built for times like these. In the apocalypse, only the creatures burrowed deep underground will survive. And if the if you rightfully believe that you hate yourself. There’s this Friedrich Nietzsche quote I got, not from actually reading Nietzsche, but from reading a Juliana Hatfield interview in Spin magazine in the ’90s that I never forgot: “Whoever despises himself still respects himself as one who despises.” What Nietzsche means — or what I think he means — is that hating oneself is ultimately a symptom of a deep love for something else. And that love can inevitably be found within.
You have to look for that thing inside you that you love and hold on to it dearly. That is your truth. That is your lighthouse. Forget what the rest of the world tells you. Every person in history who’s ever mattered has held close to their one true thing — every great artist, scientist, or visionary. I’m not saying that you’ll inevitably be successful like them if you do this. Most weird people fail; otherwise, “weird” wouldn’t even be a word. But what you’ll have in common with the Steven Spielbergs and the Albert Einsteins, even if you’re not as successful, is an unquestioned integrity. And if you have that, if you stay true to yourself, then your definition of “success” will change. It won’t be about being rich or directing a great film or writing an iconic book or being the Voice Of Your Generation. It won’t even be about recognition. It will only be about being loyal to that true thing inside you. Then you’ll be able to tell yourself, on your deathbed, that you never, not once, got lost.