For all of you who keep checking in on me, so much love your direction! I know I’ve been very quiet. Vewy quiet, though I haven’t been hunting wabbits, I swear! In fact, yesterday I was accused, oh so sweetly and gently, mind you, of becoming a hermit.
A semi-fair accusation, I must admit. Given that I’ve been trapped on my couch (I’m sitting up as I type this because lying down and typing is an exercise in aggravation) and up to so little, it’s been pretty easy to put off blogging and, realistically, all kinds of human interaction.
Add in the brain mush that resulted from all the pain and drugs, and I really didn’t feel like blogging. After all, what was I going to say? That I’m still recovering? Still suffering pain? Oooh, I’m off drugs now? This is not the type of thing I find interesting to share. So I’ve stayed quiet. (As for the friend anti-socialness, that’s probably a result of all of this plus the mindless distraction of reading & tv. Easier to vegemetate than to interact with real, live humans.)
I think my brain is coming back. Sssshhhhhh. We don’t want to scare it away. 🙂 So hopefully you’ll be hearing from me more often. Hope. It’s an enduring yet elusive thing. But that’s a topic for a different day.
Instead, the topic of the day is something I tweeted this past weekend. I asked “To become your dream self, you have to say farewell to who you are now. Is it worth it? Would you do it?”
And I got some great replies. Ranging from others who are asking themselves this type of question to the other extreme of being content with their current self and feeling no need to seek out their dream self (as that would be too much like living in a movie ((a fabulous comment!)) ).
The origin of the conversation arises, naturally, from my own personal contemplation. I’ve had a large amount of time for such thinking endeavours (though less than it would seem given the limits to said thinking), some of which I’ve actually used. The specific that triggered this instance of this train of thought (I’ve had it before) arose from dealing with my food issues.
I lost a dozen pounds during my incarceration (sounds better than illness, doesn’t it?). Turns out that you can counter a complete lack of exercise and even movement by an even larger lack of food. Between the pain and drugs I just wasn’t hungry, and it hurt too much to get food, and so I lost weight. Then I was able to move again and got off the drugs and rediscovered the joys of tasty food. Okay, so I was treating myself. 🙂 And the weight went back on. It’s been a see-saw which ultimately led me to contemplate my issues with food.
But that isn’t today’s topic, per se. Instead I’m focusing on a particular aspect of the situation that generalizes to many other aspects of life.
Obviously I have something of a preferred ideal in mind when it comes to my weight. I also have a preferred relationship that I would like to have with food. But my reactions to food are too often emotionally based which, as you may know if you’ve ever tangled with your own emotional demons, are nasty trixy things to combat.
So I have this idea/dream/preferred (yes, all ranges apply) version of myself when it comes to food. There’s that version of me. And then there’s me. There is distance between the two.
There are a select number of dream me’s that are at some distance from my reality. And the gap between the two would seem to be a simple matter of choice, will and effort.
Ha!
Behind all three of those things lurks desire. And deep within desire is our emotional history and all the other desires that conflict with the supposedly easy and obvious one of becoming the person we dream of being.
And the more hidden the desire and emotional history is, the harder it is to overcome with any other more conscience desire that we have in mind.
Ha! again.
Desire that we have in mind. Desire doesn’t lurk in the mind. It may be informed by it, but desire is in our blood, our sinews, our bones and in our emotions and thus in our subconscious.
I believe that our cultural focus on the mind limits us in matters of the heart and soul. But that’s just my opinion.
Anyhow, there is this gap between who I dream of being and who I am, that is ultimately supported by some internal need of mine to continue to be the me I am now. This need can also be fear based, because changing from the known to the unknown (after all, we only have a concept of what that dream self in that dream life is like) is scary, so is the act of leaving that which brings us some strange level of comfort or satisfaction (if it didn’t,we would have ditched the behaviour ages ago).
And then there is the death of the I-of-now. In an easy, happy world, the change towards the dream self is gradual and you just look back one day and realize that you are not the person you used to be. But sometimes the change gets so focussed in that to go from old to new requires a release of I-of-now, a death as it were, and that, that is very hard indeed.
Thus leading to my original question “To become your dream self, you have to say farewell to who you are now. Is it worth it? Would you do it?” We are very attached to who we are now, and rightly so! This is who we are. Where we find our loves, our joys and our sorrows. Not easy to simply leave behind. It’s easy to talk about, just like it’s easy to talk about switching jobs or packing up and moving away. But the actual doing? That’s a horse of an entirely different colour.
Great kudos and power to you who are doing just that! I’m still a-struggling, but that’s part of life, too.
Well, that’s my $10.50 on the matter. For today. Apparently if I don’t vent thoughts now and again, I burst out with a profusion of inanity.
Much love to all.
Blessings of the deep and wild to you and yours.
~Saturn, the Abysmal Witch.
“Is it worth it? Would you do it?” Yes I think just might. Well, that is to say I would not turn down the opportunity for change. I recently accepted a job to teach English in China for a 12 to 15 months. I have no connections (language, friends, culture, race) to China and am not a professional teacher. I have never vacationed outside of Canada. There are waves of fear, but I wait them out, i know they shall pass. If fear is a barrier it is like a wave hitting a beach, passable with good tempo.
I think the fear is finding out what might be beyond the ridges of my personal rut. Its a large enough rut, family, friends, home and away. Not narrow enough to be a problem, but it’s MY rut and feels like a part of me. Now I am leaving it for quite some time. What will become of me? I don’t know. Its the adventure of finding out that’ll be worth the ride.
Cheers, and may you heal in body and spirit soon.
Wow, that is definitely brave. Deliberately uprooting is hard, well done!
“Is it worth it? Would you do it?” I did do it.
I wholesale changed every facet of my life 3 years ago, including conquering my battle with food, with my depressive condition, with a chronic disease that had ravaged my body for a decade. I wholesale changed my relationship, my living arrangements, my relationship with my family, changed my friends… in short, I re-invented myself from scratch. Because I did it all at once, it was harder than it could have been – but I’m an ‘all-or-nothing’ kind of girl who never does anything half-way, so there was no other choice.
I had stagnated in fear for a long time, it was easier to hold on to the me I knew, and new well, rather than melt her down and forge a new one. The devil you know as opposed to the devil you don’t… as the saying goes.
When you asked your initial question, I responded with “If this is a hypothetical question, I’d say hell yes!! If this is a question about me right now, I’d say MY “dream” self is not that far off from who I am, so there would be no need to discard, instead I would incorporate it all. :)”.
I had an image in mind on my journey, of who my ‘dream-self’ would be… turns out she’s not what I imagined, and she changes and grows in a million different ways, just like the “I-of-now” changes daily.
For you a little quote from Guillaume Apollinaire: “Come to the edge, he said. They said: We are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. They came. He pushed them and they flew.”
Much love.
And wow to you. Re-inventing yourself indeed. As horribly difficult as it was, I think there is an advantage in that. On many levels and in many ways I’m living my dream self, but now I’m trying to target very specific things and excising the small bits to dramatically change them is proving frustratingly difficult. I had an easier time letting go of everything, than of one thing. Strange, eh?
Nice quote, thank you!