Improv and the Myth of the True Self

The difference between acting and improv is that, in the former, you are trying to be someone else. Sure, there’s still room for interpretation through which you can express yourself, but the premise is to inhabit another person. In improv, you take on a role (a doctor, a cook, an artist, a pilot) but you remain yourself. You have to write your own part of the script, and since you only know what you know, you can’t help but be yourself.

After a few classes, though, I began to wonder what this “self” actually is. I noticed that most people do, in fact, play themselves: a happy-go-lucky girl, a confident authority, an insecure nerd, a hyperactive boy, a skeptical critic, a mellow wise guy, and so on. Unless explicitly told to play something different, they automatically revert to these baselines.

How did these baselines, our automatic behaviors, form? It’s not as though we consciously chose them from a catalog of options in childhood. We were conditioned to respond this way. If so, why do we assume these reactions define who we are?

When I’m told to play a confident character, I can manage it for about thirty seconds before I crumble. Insecurity is my default mode. Did I choose to be this way? No. So why do I consider it my “true self”? If I kept playing confidence, say like Don Corleone, perhaps that could become my automatic response. Would I then call that my true self?

“Don’t pretend to be someone you’re not. Be yourself.”

It sounds wise, but that “self” isn’t something you chose. You didn’t even direct yourself toward it; you simply became it. “True” is just a euphemism for “automatic,” the result of adaptive strategies we developed to survive.

Growing up in Japan, I was often scolded by teachers for talking during class. When I moved to the U.S., I became quiet because I wasn’t fluent in English. Over time, that quietness became the version of me people knew, my “true” self, though it was really just a survival adaptation.

According to The Geography of Thought by Richard E. Nisbett:

Americans don’t condition their self-descriptions much on context. A study asking Japanese and Americans to describe themselves either in particular contexts or without specifying a situation showed that Japanese found it very difficult to describe themselves without context—at work, at home, with friends, etc. Americans, in contrast, tended to be stumped when a context was specified—“I am what I am.”

For Americans, the “true self” is the part that doesn’t change across contexts. The idea that it can change is even seen as insulting. But that raises the question: Did you choose it? If not, why are you so devoted to preserving it?

I confronted this during my first public performance. I had invited many friends, and realized I was more nervous performing for them than for strangers. Following the American expectation of a consistent “self,” I had always maintained a steady persona among my friends and colleagues. On stage, they would see me acting “out of character.” What made me anxious wasn’t the performance; it was the prospect of being inconsistent in front of people who thought they knew me. Strangers, who had no prior expectations, didn’t make me nervous.

It’s irrational, this attachment to a “true self.” Ironically, it’s called “true” even though it’s just a byproduct of circumstances beyond our control. That attachment is what freezes us in front of an audience. Without it, I wouldn’t care if I said something stupid. I’d simply be “a stupid man on stage,” and what’s so terrible about that? I understand this conceptually, but my mind still clings to the so-called true self. It’s a self-sabotaging mechanism. And given that I was born and raised in Japan, you’d think I’d be better at letting go, but I’m not.