Lately I’ve been reflecting on my behavior—or rather, behaviors. While I do believe I have a strong personality with specific traits, I also have a great capacity to mimic others’. This can be as subtle, and unconscious, as mirroring my conversation partner’s crossed arms, or as obvious, and deliberate, as sliding into their Southern (or Brooklyn) accent when conversing with them. You’ll never truly mistake me for a 12-year-old kid, or a 90 year old Boston matron, but I sure can play one on TV!
My delightful combo of bipolar and ADHD makes me both fascinated by the vagaries of my mind, and unable to focus on them for long. While my 500 words worth of attention is still on this subject, I wanted to share reflections on code-switching and The Chameleon Effect.
To the uninformed, code-switching is defined as a conscious change of dialect, or even language, depending on your environment. This was emphasized in Percival Everett’s wonderful novel James. Everett’s Pulitzer-winner tells the story of Jim, the slave companion to Huck Finn. My book club just finished reading and discussing it (I went a step further and re-read the source material, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.) While the original Jim is certainly a sympathetic character, James paints a much fuller portrait of a brilliant man, secretly self-taught from his white owner’s classic books. This is illustrated by his adeptness at speaking two different ways (illiterate, and highly educated), based on the company and circumstances in which he finds himself. His very life depends on making the “correct” choices. Other examples of code-switching are bilingual folks who can switch between two (or more) languages in a conversation (I’ve seen my daughter-in-law rapidly go from English to Mandarin and back again).
The Chameleon Effect is similar, but less studied. Just as our little lizardy friend can’t help changing colors when moving from green leaf to brown tree trunk, human chameleons automatically match the people around them gesture for gesture (brushing hair out of eyes, yawning).
Both are adaptive behaviors with pros and cons—any good politician can make you feel that you both are on the exact same wavelength, right? But there’s a definite risk of losing your identity completely, in your quest to blend seamlessly with your surroundings.
And me? Well, I think I have a pretty good sense of myself and my values. I’m confident that I won't betray those, just to fit in. But neither am I one of those bold (dare I say belligerent?) people who trumpet their individuality even as they are clearly being offensive: “I just call it as I see it, like it or lump it!”
So on I’ll colorfully crawl through life, sometimes switching the code, sometimes not. Don’t be shocked to see me at a party down South, “y'all”-ing to beat the band, even as I’m sharing totally New Yawk info.
Popeye declared “I yam what I yam.”
I say, “I yam, but sometimes I’m a bit of a turnip.”
No comments:
Post a Comment