On Account Of All The Rattlesnakes
Personalities or Problems, which rattles you the most?
“Jodie never sleeps
'cause there are always needles in the hay
She says that a girl needs a gun these days
Hey on account of all the rattlesnakes”
(Lloyd Cole, “Rattlesnakes”)
Do you want me to start with the skin condition, or the revelation?
The raft of dermatologists I’ve seen agree:
I have a stress-related skin condition. More accurately, I have physical manifestations of my anxiety that occur in my skin, when and where I sweat, and other biological, fun-time tricks I more or less keep up my sleeve.
I was at the dermatologist recently and she asked me what is bothering me. I held up my inner arm for her to see. As I described the condition, the small, pale bumps on my skin lit up like pissed-off red Light Brites under the fluorescents overhead.
Want to win at poker? Play with me. I have a “tell.”
I believe that people see me as a very social, very outgoing person. I’m sure this is accurate. Drinking certainly helped that. Social lubricant is / was key to a certain manifestation of me in the public sphere.
That’s a nice way of saying it helped to be a little drunk to talk to everyone in the room at parties.
The skin condition, the sweating, all that stuff existed in me long before I started drinking.
I am not alone in this.
I’m better with confrontation than I used to be. I used to visibly tremble a bit, like a mild tremor. Or, occasionally, if the moment was getting to me, and I felt overwhelmed, the opposite would happen.
Once, I remember, I lost my temper with an employee who probably deserved a little ass-kicking. This was at Batter Blaster, I’ll leave the employee out of this.
Someone was always losing their temper in a, let’s call it robust manner.
That day, it was me.
As I was getting worked up out of overwhelming frustration, I saw Sean, the founder, rolling into the hallway, scooting like Michael J Fox in Family Ties on his office chair; and I swear I heard him giggle and say “This is going to be good!”
I’m usually pretty calm. Minnesota stoic. I take new problems from the “that’s why they call it work” perspective, and honestly, sometimes, get a bit of a kick out of a new, totally-fucked up problem that I’m going to have to dig in and solve.
“Oh shit, we’re going to have to stay late and work through this one!”
It’s the midwestern masochist, get-er-done-ist, crossed with the unrelenting ass-kisser in me.
But confrontation, that has always been my weakness.
If you want to undercut me and rattle me, just be totally unreasonable!
When I would work in dysfunctional environments where someone else would either thrive off the discomfort, or use it to their advantage, no wonder I would spin out, going from feeling like I could do anything, to feeling mortally incapable of practically everything.
That’s a wide swath. And a pretty unhealthy work-sick condition I have no intention of repeating.
It did not matter what I had done in the past. My confidence in the now was shaken to the core.
I’m getting over all this, mind you. Therapy helps. So does giving about 1000 less shits what other folks think.
In other words, perspective. And if there’s one thing aging does well, it gives you lots of perspective.
I always found that I was more successful mimicking the people around me, their mannerisms, jokes, cultural references, as a way to engage them at a level they understood.
Through that I found that making friends, or talking to strangers, was easier. But I always asked a lot of questions too, I was naturally curious. Suddenly I found myself with a shit ton of people I knew. My late friend Peter Ellenby once said that I had calluses on my palms from all the handshakes.
It was easier to make friends with everyone than bear out a single, inalienable me.
Still, as I got older, unflappability became a side effect of all of the above. I almost craved problems to solve. I’d much rather be the hero than the problem.
I’m not particularly afraid of conflict, even, anymore. Just unreasonability. Chaos. Territorial pissing.
Y’know. Personalities.
And here’s the revelation: Figuring out that I would get rattled over personalities, and not problems, took me years.
It means I have to shift my whole center, adjust my strategies for coping in a social world.
It means that I have to deal with the reality of being an introvert, in a world I’d created where nobody believes — in the least! — that I am an introvert.
Is it possible to be a highly functioning, extroverted introvert?
Apparently, yes. It’s called an “Ambivert.”
It’s possible to crave your alone time, to feel most secure when you’re reading a book or writing - probably why I’m so comfortable in this new skin.
But it’s also possible, at the same time, to crave human interaction, to line up your pals like medals, arrange supergroups of your favorite artists, be the maven you intended to be.
This is a party I threw for years at the Hole in the Wall. It started as a lark, Sean volunteering me as a last minute replacement for a cancelled SXSW show at the Hole. Suddenly I had more artists than I could fit on the schedule asking to play.
These days, depending on the room I’m in, I’m either a relic, a narc or an asshole.
I like to think of myself like some sort of business ninja — no shit, someone actually called me that once. Some sort of startup Swiss Army knife.
Yeah, a Swiss Army Knife with three blades: asshole, narc, relic.
“And a wine opener,” Rose yells from the other room.
Ok, and a wine opener.
A traveler, a business cosplayer, a wind up entrepreneur.
A consultant.
Consultants have it a bit easier - if there’s confrontation, we can pretty much walk away. Theoretically, anyway.
Don’t want to pay enough to engage me? No worries, I’ll find someone else.
You still have to deal with personalities though.
It’s a lot easier to weather the physical “tells” over Zoom, or Google Meet, or whatever.
And also, it’s a lot easier to give those 1000 less shits when it’s not your baby, not your startup, not your pension plan and yacht plan and whatever else you’ve bundled in that stock option fever dream.
The rattlesnakes can’t get at you through the webcam.
Where does all this get me?
Since I started writing this weekly newsletter, I was saying to a friend, I have never felt so self-aware.
As a "non writer" -- although I say that speciously, I wrote for years for pay early in my career, 750+ words a day for publication -- putting the diligence in to get out 1500 words a week, about myself, forces me to put into words long held but vague beliefs, and then cross-examine them.
So this realization that I need to confront personalities with the vigor and calm I apply to problems, that's pretty new.
When I was considering this piece, and the last one — about “Assholes” as you’ll remember — I found myself looking up various personality types. “Sociopath.” “Psychopath.” “Malignant narcissist.”
It was in reading these descriptions that I started to drift off on these various strands that led me to the revelation. First was, the fella I mentioned in the last piece: Malignant narcissist of the first order. Clear as day. Stamp that card.
I’d always been described as a people-pleaser, as a “star fucker,” as a name dropper.
Not as a problem solver. Not as someone who you’d rely upon for unflappability.
I mean, maybe. I don’t know. I’m always trying to understand what other people actually think of me.
Whenever I had a feeling a colleague didn’t like me, or was manipulating me, I’d keep hanging out with them until I felt the appreciation I craved. Wear them down. That’s not a healthy way to live.
Perhaps it’s finally stopping giving all those 1000 shits about what people think. About the myriad labels applied to me. About what I perceive myself as being actually skilled in.
Perhaps that’s the clue to move to the next level of understanding. Of navigating the rattlenakes.
Maybe as Lloyd Cole says, “Love is all you need.”
Or maybe, just maybe, it’s the other people that are the problem.
Maybe narcissism is contagious!
Thanks for reading. I’m Nick Tangborn and this is Are You Experienced. I like to write about being over 50 and pretending you’re still 16, even if 16 year olds don’t take probiotics, multivitamins, arthritis medication and immune support.
I’ve done a bunch of stuff in my career, from running Ops at a pancake batter company to helping start the first music streaming service, to building BitTorrent products and products built on BitTorrent. I have a Guinness World Record for the most pancakes made and served in 8 hours by a team (76,832). I have a patent. So why am I still such a self doubting noodge?
Reach out to me at nicholas@areyouexperienced.co if you have any answers.
(That’s right, dot C-O, someone stole the M)
I really appreciate your thought process. Especially liked this insight: “It means that I have to deal with the reality of being an introvert, in a world I’d created where nobody believes — in the least! — that I am an introvert.”
Also, yes, nobody believes me when I say I'm an introvert