The ugly question

“Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.” — E.E. Cummings

You've been asked it a thousand times. You've probably asked it too.

So, what do you do?

It's part of the furniture of social life. Two strangers meet, and within a minute one of them reaches for it. It feels polite. It feels harmless.

But listen to what it's actually doing. We rarely ask it out of curiosity. We ask it to sort. We want to place the other person quickly in our picture of the world, and draw a ring around the conversation we're about to have. Oh, a project manager. Great, now I know what we'll talk about.

That small sense of control has a price. What follows is usually safe, surface-level and a bit boring. Most of our conversations are like this, and we get very good at compressing ourselves to fit.

So what do you do? is an ugly question. It shrinks the possibility space before the conversation has even started.

One side of the cube

Picture two people in that conversation, each showing the other one side of a Rubik's cube, solved to a single, perfectly uniform colour. That's the version of each of them that fits the container they happen to be in.

But people aren't one side of anything. A real Rubik's cube has more than 43 quintillion combinations, and the neat one-colour face is only one of them. Whole people are like that: many-sided, mostly hidden, and capable of surprising you, if they feel safe enough to mix it up.

Underneath, the ugly question is asking for a marketable identity. What's your job? Where do you fit? What are you worth? For people who follow curiosity across fields and won't stay in one box, it's a genuinely hard question. Not because there's nothing to say, but because there's too much, and none of it fits on one side.

A better answer isn't the answer

The usual fix is to work on a better answer. A sharper pitch. A tidier title.

It won't stay put. The moment you crystallise an answer, it's already out of date, a snapshot of someone who has kept moving. The skill worth having is different: being able to improvise an answer every time, one that's always different but never changes, because it comes from the same place. Later in this sequence, we'll call that place your red thread.

You don't get there by polishing. You get there by going back to what's underneath.

A beautiful question

So try a different question. What lights you up?

That's a beautiful question. The answer could be anything, and it could lead anywhere. Most of us are badly out of practice at asking each other questions like that, for reasons we all know. That's fine. Here is somewhere to practise.

If it feels too big, come at it sideways. When are you your favourite version of yourself? The moments when time dissolves, your face is full of wonder, and nothing can quite touch you because you're simply absorbed.

You may not have an answer near the surface, or not one that feels like yours. That's common. Some parts of you may not have had much attention for a while. Finding them again is less like learning something new and more like unforgetting. The Greek word for truth, aletheia, means something like this: coming back up out of Lethe, the river of forgetting.

Armour and costume

We wear social armour for good reasons. It keeps us safe, and nobody should run into battle in their undies. So this isn't about throwing it away.

It's about noticing it's there, and finding out what it feels like to take it off for a while, somewhere safe. Over time the armour can give way to something else: a costume that fits you so well it shows off what's best in you. And once you've worn it, even once, you may find the costume starts to travel inwards.

This answer isn't for them. It's for you.

Try this

Over the next few days, notice the moments when you feel most like your favourite self. Write them down. They don't need to be polished. Pick whichever prompt speaks to you:

• What do I always end up talking about, even when I'm not trying?
• What do I do where I lose track of time?
• When did I feel I was exactly where I was meant to be?

If you'd like a mirror, ask two people who know you well:

• When have I lifted someone's spirits just by being myself?
• What have I been into forever, and why do you think it's stuck?
• If you planned my perfect day, what would it look like?
• If I won the lottery tomorrow, what would I spend my time doing?

Then put your answer somewhere you'll see it, in words that feel like yours, even if nobody else would understand them without a lot of questions.

For a printable version of the favourite-self prompts and all six mirror questions, with room to write, there's a sheet to keep: Favourite self (PDF) ↗

Next in Unforgetting: The shrink-wrapped octopus. Why the question bites so hard, and what it's been doing to us since school.

Preparing a Red Thread Talk? Keep what you write here. It's the first page of your kit.