Why So Serious?

On rare occasion, I am told or am in a spot to overhear comments describing me in words I don't understand. Sometimes words that even 'urban dictionary' didn't know. Some other times, it's a word in every dictionary, and I still have trouble getting it.

Serious. "You're so serious!" Or, overheard while dancing, "he's so serious!"

Both people who have said this to me personally I happen to respect. They seem well-intentioned when they say it. And at least in hindsight I'm grateful that they've said it. It prompts questions. And as painful as it is for me to question my personality, experience tells me that doing so can give skills for living with it.

Both people who have told me also seem to have meant at least two different things. The first person seemed to mean, in their usual hyperbole, "lacking a sense of humour," which I understand to mean "lacking their sense of humour." It was interesting later on, feeling solidarity with Sheldon Cooper from The Big Bang Theory. It was with that show that I could see what I'll call 'sarcasm-shortsightedness' as a not overly rare personality trait.

That first time I was told, some years ago now, I was annoyed. The second time, last year while discussing government surveillance, it seemed so empty a remark, like saying grass is green. Most recently, the third time, has charmed me into writing about it.

Mostly because it was put so considerately: "you don't always have to be serious." It's hard to disagree with such a measured remark.

It's also hard because I have trouble picturing what 'not being serious' is like. To question such an apparently simple thing feels reminiscent of a story about the German mathematician Theodor Kaluza, who - to learn to swim - supposedly read a treatise on swimming, then dove into the ocean.

Except, in questioning this, there is no book. Near as I can tell, they meant to say that I could, sometimes, be uninhibited. To suspend concern for consequence. They were even generous enough to imagine I could do that without alcohol.

There are only three possibilities here, they see a strength in me that I don't, they think I could find such strength, or they are cruelly taunting my fear. I can't believe the latter.

I see strength differently. To describe me as serious overlooks two separate inhibitions: I avoid situations in which I don't know how to act - where possible - and when they are not possible or desirable to avoid, I inhibit any hope for anything more than a distraction.

Only this year did I realise that my alienation only serves to alienate others, and that to stop the mood of disappointment betraying me I have to abandon such hope. This is the sole brand of "fake it 'till you make it" I know how to pull off. By not being fake at all. If that earns the title of seriousness, I'll just live with that.

A little pre-writing research revealed how people usually feel frustrated or annoyed when their seriousness is pointed out to them. It doesn't feel like something under our control. I've heard of studies that say introverts can act extroverted occasionally - it's just not an act they can maintain for long. Could I act less serious more often? It sounds possible.

I have friends who I know appreciate me for who I am. When others say "be yourself," it is hard to call them selfish. It is very easy, when others call for you to act.

All they have to do is talk. I would have to learn the act (how?) and endure failure. Is it selfish not to try? Is there more enduring pain if I don't try?

That's a thought that haunts me.

Humility as a Driver of Innovation?

I'm just a singer with a song
How can I try to right the wrong
For just a singer with a melody
I'm caught in between
With a fading dream

-- Freddie Mercury, In My Defence

Typically when someone acts on behalf of an organisation, it is the organisation, not that someone, who is considered responsible for making sure they both act in each-other's interests. This recognisably feudal attitude - where labour is traded for security - is the basis for such things as "commissions, profit sharing, efficiency wages," and so on.


It would be a clear failure of imagination on the part of an organisation to try and buy solidarity from an employee for whom the only dollar figure able to do that would best go towards their independence.

At least, it would be - if organisations knew the feelings and attitudes of those working with them. In this light it is curious but unsurprising that things like 'twenty-percent time' and horizontal business structures are mostly discussed as policies of innovation rather than policies of humility.

Just as whistleblowers are only desirable in the presence of imperfect institutions, when managers can justifiably not know some thoughts of those working for them, empathy is critical from colleagues who are trusted with that information.

If blindspots are not formally acknowledged as they may be in such practices as Valve's (which seems superior for this to Google's individualistic policy - though I work for neither), then the only remaining line of defence against wasted talent is that of employees who are proud of good, meaningful work. And since little of meaning can be achieved without collaborating, empathetic colleagues who have time to spare.

If employees are convinced their work is good, are we half way there? Or less?

Why I Dance

For better or worse, mostly worse, the question of why I dance has been a lens through which I have tried to understand myself. This question has occupied me for as long as I've danced: nearly a decade now; and new looks at old answers to the question occur to me every few months.

Introspection, like curiosity, is something you can only distract; never silence. Self-questioning is never boring, but it has become tiring.  After a while you have to wonder if they are the kind of questions which can have conclusive answers, or whether you'll always be keeping up with the subtle changes in your own silhouette. If like me most of the answers you come upon are upsetting, and you think that there's no point in self-questioning if all it leads to is self-flagellation, maybe you soon begin to doubt that you're asking useful questions.

That's where I am right now. I think I need a better lens.

The problem with the answers I find at present are not their accuracy, but their focus. They all cling to the past, and like all bad distractions make it impossible to be optimistic about the future. This monocle should retire to its proper home: fiction.

Unsurprisingly given this tunnel-vision, the best insight I've heard on this has come from the outside. Perhaps surprisingly from Madonna, in her tribute to my greatest dancing inspiration, at the 2009 Video Music Awards. She said that "when you never get to have something, you become obsessed by it." For Madonna, that something was a mother figure. In very different senses, for Michael Jackson and me that something was a missed childhood.

I have long felt I missed what seems the norm of this period; learning to make friends in a way that I can only express as to have them not seem like one-in-two-billion gifts of chance. To not have recoiled reflexively when touched for the first time on the shoulder by (my goodness!) a girl. To not (still!) occasionally blush when trying to make the most trivial conversation with an unfamiliar member of the opposite sex. To not have learned to feel helpless.

For a long time I hoped that dancing could compensate for the social skills I lack, could help me connect with others. Instead it entrenched the feeling that I would need to be someone else for that to happen. That I would find myself in more relationships if I was gay. That in order to be exceptional one must accept being an outsider. And that the only means for an outsider to escape loneliness are wealth and power.

Never did it, like writing this, make me think that considering every friend a product of random chance refuses both myself and those friends credit for the qualities that we have bonded over. I love that my friends seem so special to me, but hate that this makes me feel both old and childish - given a range of encounters that are either rare or novel (and blush-inducing). I feel cowardly whenever I leave it to others to break the ice, or when I otherwise know that I am only doing so because others are obliged to be friendly.

I can no longer endorse the idea that I could only have honed my hobby in an absence of friends. There's too much evidence that creativity does not have to be a casualty of socialising. Reality doesn't tolerate such grandiose musings. While Madonna may be right to say that most performers are "shy and plagued with insecurities", using statistics about insecurity to feel part of a privileged 'in-group' crosses the line between becoming more self-assured and further fortifying that insecurity.

I am tired of religiously defining myself by what should just be a fun cardio workout that doubles as entertainment. In the words of William Ernest Henley:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.