Playing Yourself-Improvement

Let’s try to get better at playing ourselves in 2017.

At the New Yorker today, Jia Tolentino declares 2016 “the year we played ourselves.” She describes the phenomenon like this:

The act of playing yourself can be loosely defined as working against your conscious intentions. It’s what you do when you think you’re serving your own interests but are actually betraying them — often through significant effort, often in a spectacularly public way.

In case you’re more of an example-based learner, here’s the case of one man who played himself twice over this year:

A striking 2016 example comes from a man in Vancouver, who, in dealing with the stress of his wife’s apparent infertility, developed a wandering eye. In order to indulge it, he asked his wife for an open marriage; she subsequently got pregnant by someone else. In June, he wrote a personal essay about this journey on the Huffington Post, and then, after facing ridicule, he requested that the editors delete it. (This story illustrates a crucial axiom of playing yourself in the age of the Internet: the act tends to beget more examples of the same.)

So essentially, playing yourself is making a big show out of demonstrating something, and then either bungling your point or contradicting yourself entirely during the demonstration. And we have played ourselves a lot this year: Anyone who bought a dad-style message hat for $45 to communicate their carefree, non-corporate lifestyle played themselves. Anyone who thought Kylie Jenner was a dunce who wasn’t gonna wring a couple hundred thousand bucks out of “the year of realizing stuff” played themselves. Donald Trump played himself when he won the presidency.

One of the toughest parts of playing yourself, though, is that the player’s understanding of their misstep isn’t necessarily part of the equation. Consider the chain of events: Up until the moment you play yourself, you think you’re pursuing a valuable goal backed by sound reasoning. When you don’t meet your goal, your first instinct may not be to ask, “Have I….. owned myself?” And unless someone takes you aside to help you understand what the deal is, you may very well miss the play altogether.

Tolentino uses the example of Abigail Fisher, the student who brought her 2008 rejection from the University of Texas to the Supreme Court claiming she was rejected because of her whiteness and therefore affirmative action is unconstitutional. She ended up losing the case (and the media had a fun time laughing at her sense of entitlement), but for all we know she may still be, to this day, playing herself. Publicly losing in court doesn’t mean Fisher now understands affirmative action’s constitutional tenets, it just means she’s been told, “This conversation is over. Unless something new comes up, please stop talking to us about college admissions.” Somewhere in America right now, at a chicas cocktail hour or an office holiday party, Abigail Fisher may very well still be playing herself post-mortem.

“Accepting that playing yourself happens, that’s the ideal way to go,” Tolentino posits in her piece, and I agree, but I’d also like to challenge us all to go a step further in 2017: Ask someone if you’re playing yourself when you suspect that you are. There’s a quote from Cicero I saw in a movie recently that goes, “It is the nature of every person to error, but only the fool perseveres in error.” In other words, it’s normal to fuck up. That doesn’t make you an idiot. What makes you an idiot is noticing you’re probably fucking up and choosing not to do anything about it.

So in this next calendar year, when the suspicion you’re in the middle of a self-own pops up, maybe turn to someone and say, “Hey, am I playing myself right now?” And maybe they’ll let you know. Maybe they’ll even talk to you about it and share some of their perspective, and you’ll be able to proceed with more than just your own thoughts and feelings to work from. Will it stop us from making mistakes? Of course not. It might even open the doors to make fresh new ones! But it also might help us understand our shit enough to not repeat our gaffes over and over again in new and exotic contexts.

Recognizing the phenomenon of playing ourselves in 2016 is definitely an important start, but it’s worthwhile to also try to get better at playing ourselves. Let’s get graceful in 2017. Constructive. That way, when we’re feeling embarrassed or like we’ve failed, we can say, “I’m embarrassed!” or “I suspect I just failed!” and learn from it, like people who are more interested in making progress than protecting our egos.