He was speaking of a medical professional in his 60s, known in his circles as an expert bird photographer, with his images being widely admired when he displays them. Yet, he is an unpopular man.
“Sir, he is extremely possessive. As an example, if there is a great location to observe and photograph birds that he has stumbled upon, he will keep that secret. On one occasion, when he received information that a rare migratory bird was spotted in a grassland, he did all the photography he could and then let everyone know about the location after the bird had left! He disturbed the bird repeatedly to improve his images, which is a wrong thing to do and he knows it. Can you believe that he now brags about how he did that; just look at his gumption!”
We drive on in the car and this description of the man gets me thinking. How did he become like this? The insecurity, possessiveness, desperate need for exclusivity, the superiority that seeks to prove others wrong (a syndrome I have, in jest, labelled ‘I no more!’) that borders on arrogance and vanity, the belief that everything should revolve around him…..
It is a long car drive, long enough for the answer to unravel slowly, for revisiting a person’s imagined history defines where he is now. A childhood spent in insecurity with possibly unrelenting parents who believed that praise would spoil the child, an adolescence that felt the scarcity of warmth and received conditional praise instead when academic performance met parental expectations. A youth spent in proving oneself, yet in remaining unproven, or with a circle of friends where each one lived to tell a self-absorbed tale and he needed to belong. So when money - lots of it - reached him, that insecurity, possessiveness, attention-seeking behaviour and obsession with himself did not go away but only accelerated, for he could afford equipment and exclusivity that was designed to exclude and inflict to feed an inner seeker of solace.
Beneath all that bravado, I suggested to my colleague, this man was deeply unhappy and troubled, wanting affirmation and status. Perhaps he knew that the praise he received was qualified and designed to flatter, yet he needed - and still needs - it to look in the mirror and say, “I matter”. Those flashes of brag and I-me-myself are conversations with himself.
Once we recognise the vulnerability beneath the bravado and display, dislike may change its form to one of empathy. Perhaps sympathy as well.
And the whole truth is that each of us knows someone like that photographer of images, who has been trapped in one of his own.
