No matter how many times we’ve heard (or maybe you’re hearing it now for the first time?) that our cells renew on average every decade, making us for the most part a different person multiple times in a lifetime, we are still very attached to the idea of a stable, firm self. It’s partly comforting, partly constraining, and we let go of the idea only reluctantly, even when it hurts us more than it benefits us.
We are stuck with the idea that the authentic self has to be found and defined clearly, that after the confusion of our first 20 to 30 years of life, lived for (or against) our parents, our peers, someone else’s approval, the satisfaction of chaotic instincts, ambitions we’ve borrowed elsewhere, comes clarity, and clarity is about lists of dos and donts, boundaries set and enforced, and adjectives we associate to ourselves vs. the ones we reject.
Well, no.
The authentic self is a community.
A community of centered beings, with gravity supporting them, but a whole range of movement, so broad it’d be impossible to predict all their crossings.
For this reason, when someone tells me “Well, that’s just who I am. I’m made for this kind of things.” I wonder how they learned and then kept teaching themselves this strictness of potential. How have we all learned it, after all. We have been, in the best cases, encouraged to know our strengths and weaknesses, improve where we could and accept our limits; in the worst cases, we have received projections of all sorts of musts and lacks, none of which belonged to us, but all of which we feel responsible for thanks to how early and constantly we were fed them.
”I knew you were going to react this way. It’s so you!”
Ah, the comforting illusion of predictability. Comforting until it becomes a cage. Comforting until life shows, gently or not, how only change is predictable.
For the longest time we juggle with certain traits being either curse or blessing, feeling them as tangibly familiar yet terribly distant, but struggling so much to get rid of their defining power. Even after years of self-discovery we might resort to simple prophecies to describe who we are. Sometimes it’s the resume provided by our family (”My mom told me I was always this stubborn, since I was a toddler”), others it’s the diagnosis of a specialist (“This is my ADHD talking”), but it’s never an extra layer of understanding, it becomes a confine within which we have to narrowly move.
It becomes an alibi for not dealing with ourselves, our plan B after plan A (being pure chaos, not having a clue about ourselves) failed.
Let’s take reassurance for what it is: not an end goal, but a trampoline for discovery. A nice, firm wall where we can poke a hole in and look at the beautiful maze it’s part of.
Empatherapy 