The Many Me
I have had a difficult day today and it is for the thinnest of reasons, but perhaps also, the most fundamental of reasons. This morning I did what I always tend to do when traveling, which is to get up somewhat earlier than Kim. As I usually do, I went down to the breakfast room ahead of her and proceeded to get started without her. I tend to do a full, what they call, English breakfast, with eggs and bacon, while Kim usually does something far less substantial. When she did finally come down for breakfast, I was surprised to see that her hair was completely different than she has worn it for the past several weeks since she had it cut. I’m not talking about a minor change, but the difference between a short straight “bob” haircut and now a very curly “flip” hairdo. I was surprised and I commented, but otherwise we went about our morning. When we got back to the room I asked her very carefully about the change and she explained that it was just what her hair decided to do this morning. I told her that I did not dislike the new look, but that I preferred the other “bob” style she had sported for a few weeks. And that was it. Until we were joined in the foyer by Mike and Melisa, who I had warned that Kim was sporting a very different hairstyle. The first comment she made to them was that “Rich told me he doesn’t like my hair today.” And that’s all it took. My morning was off.
I do not consider myself a terribly sensitive soul or a delicate flower petal of a person. I spent forty-five years in the senior ranks on Wall Street, where barbs are tossed around as the normal course. Guys always tend to jab one another as a part of the give and take of life, so one learns to get as well as one gives if one is to survive. In addition to that, my personality, as most who read this and know me will recognize, is somewhat larger than life. There are more flamboyant or outsized personalities around to be sure, but I think its fair that among the run-of-the-mill sorts you meet on any given day, I fall at the far end of the outsized spectrum. What that means is that few people assume I am sensitive about getting jabbed, which is mostly true, but there is an exception. For some strange reason, I give a very big shit about people thinking that I would treat my wife in any way other than nicely, since that is what I do. I want people to think I treat everyone nicely, but ESPECIALLY my lovely wife. Anything that alters that sense bothers me, so now you understand why my morning was off. My own wife was, for some reason, declaring to our relatively new friends that I was not treating her nicely.
Let’s be clear about one thing right away, in the eighteen years that Kim and I have been together, she has never done anything that I have ever seen that is spiteful, mean-spirited or intentionally nasty. This is not just to me, but to anyone. It’s not in her. I wish I could claim the same, but I don’t think I can. I know few who could. Perhaps I have placed Kim on a pedestal, but that is where she stands with me. So, I do not consider anything she said this morning as wrong. What I think is that I have a problem. I spent the morning thinking about that problem and have concluded that I have a problem of contrasts.
I am suddenly discovering that I have many contradictory ways about me. Now, I value self awareness a great deal and have always felt that, as the t-shirt says, the unexamined life is not worth living. Recognizing one’s own frailties and limitations seems to me to be pretty damn important. Accepting responsibility and accountability for your own actions is equally important. I am regularly accused of overthinking things, but I can’t agree that one can overthink one’s own manner or actions. That all leaves me with a new baseline observation that there are many me’s in here and I need to manage that situation better.
For instance, in this situation which kicked off this whole line of thought today, I need to recognize that as a man, I start out in a primordial sense as a bit of a brute. We were designed to go out each day and slay the wildebeest and that’s all there is to it. Oh, and by the way, there is always a saber-toothed tiger lurking in the tall grass ready to pounce on your ass, so you had better be ready for that too. I often say I have too little respect for money and never worked for money, but rather for higher forms of self-actualization. That may be relatively true, but who am I kidding? Providing for my family is pretty high on my Maslowian needs, so in reality, I care more than I admit. But none of that excuses brutish nature.
At my psychological core, I am a person who cares about others, perhaps even too much for my own good. That’s why I am a “libtard” to my red friends. That’s why I get characterized as generous by many. That’s why I do many things that I do. Many people I know, mostly men, but not only, simply don’t give a shit like I seem to. Does that make them worse people? Maybe not, and I bet they stay up at night thinking about it all a lot less than I do. It doesn’t even make me better, just different and different in a way that I have to manage better.
As I pondered this issue today I found myself coming up with a very full array of contradictions in who I am, but the fundamental one remains the brute that tries to give a shit. I take that back to both my mother and father. She killed more wildebeests than most men and he gave less of a shit than almost anyone I know even though on the surface he was, as they say here in Italy, molto gentile. We all take our role models where we find them and those were mine. If I did not enter the business world as a brute, I sure learned how to be one in those trenches. I was regularly being reminded by various employees and peers that I was “too nice” for Wall Street, but that was just not so. I was simply a more complex version of a Wall Street banker.
In any case, this afternoon I got over my being off by talking it through with Kim and off we all went for the food tour she had arranged in Trastevere. I had the cab drive us through St. Peter’s square and up the Jannicular Hill to look at the dusty visage of Rome’s rooftops, a sight that hasn’t changed in 50 years and perhaps not so much in 1,500 years. It is a soulful sight. We then stopped in Trastevere for me to show the gang my youthful stomping grounds in the Piazza de Santa Maria in Trastevere, which harkens me back to my innocence of youth. All very soft and gentle-minded. And then on to the food tour.
Our tour was with nine other miscellaneous English-speakers, led by a lovely local young woman with plenty of ink on her forearms. In the four eatery locales we enjoyed, we all sat next to different people and got to interact with them all. They ranged from the Belgian gym teacher to the Orange County flight instructor trying to become a commercial airline pilot. But the two that made me stop and appreciate the diversity were the two that brought out my own contradictions. There was the Liverpool nurse who lived in Northern Ireland. As we discussed our life and times, when she realized I was a liberal anti-Trumper, she reached up with her prudishly clad arm and high-fived me and said she was so happy to meet a liberal American who cared about people. But then over gelato at our final stop, I met the lesbian couple from Dublin who worked, respectively, in the fund administration business and the prime brokerage investment banking business. They were so very excited to meet me and talk about the brutish events of the Wall Street investment era I had lived through and they had witnessed from their onshore/offshore perch in Dublin. That’s when it dawned on me, maybe being a complex and contradictory soul that comes off as many me’s, is not all bad and actually has its advantages…at least on a Trastevere food tour.