Who's going to let you?

Howard Roark laughed.

That is the first line of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: an iconic sentence in its own right, and for me, one that set off an internal Rube Goldberg machine, with that first sentence being the first ball slowly starting to roll. The journey itself transcends the book and will never be finished, but the question of my self-worth, and the fact of my literal space on earth, took on deep hold that day, and has not let up since.

As controversial and cliche as it may be, I read the Fountainhead when I was fifteen, a quintessentially influenceable age. I was always a shy kid, lacking self-confidence: what would politely be called a “pushover”. I judged my worth by my friends’ attitudes towards me, and my happiness by the grades on my report card. I was one of those well-off, privileged kids who knew it and wasn’t sure how to handle it: whether to apologize, give it away, or not acknowledge it at all. And not having any language or self-awareness of that conflict back then, I was simply quiet. Deferential. Meek.

Reading The Fountainhead at that age, in that state of mind, was like having someone say to me: actually, you do matter. Actually, you can take up that space. It’s not only ok, it’s actually your moral obligation. It was like the feeling of your first deep breath after your nose has been stopped up from a cold. Nothing better, right? And while that very likely overstates the tangible effects on my life (I don’t recall my friendships or my priorities actually changing), this is true: it changed the way I felt about myself.

It’s such a fascinating thing to think about now, a couple decades later. Many of those concepts are a resounding message of progressive millennials today, and yet Ayn Rand is probably seen as the opposite of the progressive millennial. Is the disconnect mine?

I think that the average liberal person has heard of Ayn Rand’s novels and philosophy and on principle has rejected them, and not for no reason. However, what strikes me is that a lot of the philosophical messages I glean from The Fountainhead are not dissimilar to the colorfully liberal posts that populate my feeds. Practice self-love and know your worth? Prioritize your own happiness and health? Cut out toxic relationships that only take and take? Don’t sacrifice your ideals just because they’re not popular? Don’t let gender define your role?

And yet, I also know that Objectivism can be taken much further than self-love and self-worth, and that it has been used as a platform and a smokescreen for conservative politicians to push agendas. Herein is where my second biggest lesson from The Fountainhead lies: the art of the nuanced truth. Do I agree with Ayn Rand’s politics? No. Do I think those politics are possible on Earth? No. But was I inspired by the idealistic figures she created? Yes. Are both realities truly possible?

The striking thing about realizing that I rejected some of the major conclusions of the book’s philosophy was the realization that I had the power to both agree and disagree with it concurrently, and further, the power to not care about it. And this is the nuanced truth: that nothing is black and white, that I can be inspired by a story without wanting to be the author’s friend, that I can hold two conflicting ideas in my mind without sacrificing my own right to decide. And, interestingly, that too is one of the lessons Rand hammers home the strongest: to not let anyone else make one’s decisions for them; to always trust the conclusions of one’s own mind first and foremost. By acknowledging that I have the power to learn from her work and yet disagree with it, I am ironically exercising that same right that she preached.

Rereading the book in later years, as a college student and then a thirty-something, I did not feel the same awe that I felt at fifteen. What I felt instead was a warm familiarity, an acknowledgement of my self at that point in time and my self today. And instead of denouncing that time in my life, I can approach it now with the thought: it’s not required to be able to debate every detail of Objectivism, every teaching of her philosophy, to be able to say that at one point in my life, The Fountainhead was a sort of inflection point for me.

As a liberal person today, it would be easier to give up that nuance entirely and join the camp that denounces Rand altogether. But The Fountainhead was important to me, and will always hold a special memory of a feeling, a feeling when I was looking for something without knowing what it was. And if cherry picking lessons from a novel is possible, this one will always be a beautifully written reminder that I, and each individual human on earth, do matter.