Persona

We live in a world where people are labeled. Everyone has a type, a style, a persona.

These words are thrown at people, famous people mostly, and some of them stick. And then that’s what that person becomes. This director is gritty. This writer is witty. This actress is flashy. The walk-on athlete is a gym rat. The politician is tough.

Like that means something.

“Tough.” What does that mean, to be tough? Is he strong? Or more resistant to pain than are most people? Is she just an asshole, but a successful asshole that most people seem to like therefore she can only be “tough”?

More importantly, do they try? Do these famous people, at whom we can only throw words, even care which words get thrown at them?

I do. I care and I try. I think most of us down here on the ground do. There’s that guy who keeps cracking cheesy jokes at the water cooler. He’s trying. He really cares what people think of him. He really cares that people think he is funny, maybe more than some comedians care whether some random stranger in a cheap suit and a polyester tie thinks of how funny they are.

He wants a word thrown at him. He wants to be something. He wants people to call him funny or witty or bright or sharp. His dearest wish is to sit alone in a bathroom stall and hear Bob and Tom washing their hands and laughing about a joke he told earlier, about how funny he was, how funny he is. He craves that label. So does that guy who refuses to use any word under three syllables. He wants to be smart. He wants to be a thing that he can quantify, that others can identify. We all do, I think.

There are people who try really hard to be something. Arnold Schwarzenegger tried really hard to become the physical embodiment of perfection. He lifted weights and ate a special diet in order to sculpt his musculature and become the perfectly balanced human being. He got on stages and flexed and posed and won awards and he became Mr. Universe. Boom. There’s his label: the best body in the universe. I wonder how much he cared about that label. I think it mattered more to him than the trophies or the women or the image that bounced back at him from a mirror. People called him the best. People called him perfect. That word had to have been enough, the way it rolled off his tongue when he said it, the way it vibrated against his eardrum when others called him it.

Tough. Sometimes that’s all I want to be. Tedy Bruschi, my favorite (American) football player he was tough, perhaps stupidly. He hit hard. Once he ripped the ball out of the hands of another player, just took it away from him. He even (again, stupidly) came back to playing football after suffering a stroke.

I wanted to be tough.

When I was in Little League Baseball, I played catcher. One game – only a quarter of the way through the season – I caught a pitch awkwardly; the ball must have twisted my thumb a bit oddly. My hand hurt pretty badly, but I kept playing. I played for the rest of the year. Almost every time I caught the ball, my hand would hurt. Sometimes, when the ball hit my thumb just so, a bolt of pain would flash through my arm. I, a stubby little fifth grader, would jump out of my stance behind the plate, I throw off my catcher’s mitt and shake my throbbing hand. I would, like my idols on television, wave off the team manager and return to the plate, catch another pitch and smile to myself.

I wanted to be tough.

My team won the town championship that year. I was nominated to the town All-Star team and I won a cheap plastic trophy for sportsmanship. My thumb was broken, but it felt great to hear my coach call me tough when he handed me my trophy.

I wanted to be tough, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t tough when I broke my thumb or stupidly played through the pain in order to win the town Little League championship. I was tough when someone else told me I was tough.

Is this why we need other people? We can build an infinite number of monuments to ourselves. We can accomplish whatever great tasks we want to and we can do it without the help or acknowledgment of other people. But there’s something magical about hearing someone else praise us, getting them to tell us what we want to, what we need to, hear.

But why does that matter so much?