My friend Maria tweeted me this article on personality; and for those not on twitter, I thought it might be helpful to bring it over here. There are lots of themes, in the content, that correspond scarily to what’s going on in my head.

The basic premise is that in the quest for a fixed sense of self, we’re chasing a red herring or creating the next trap; because personality is fluid, the emphasis better placed on experience, instead of trying to hone in on descriptions -and fixed points – and an exact, unwavering sense of exactly who I am:

“The irony is that the more you seek to identify who you are, the more likely that you feel fragile about yourself. There is an inverse correlation between this question and your comfort with experiencing your life. The emphasis shouldn’t be on discovering what is buried beneath, but on facilitating the emergence of what we’d like to become.”

Ouch. I can totally relate to that.

It makes sense though (this need to try and discover) and the author, Mel Schwartz, provides a few examples that resonate strongly with my experience of an eating disorder. For example, he refers to a release from prison, and the consequent fear of the unknown which the containment to liberation might precipitate:

“Suppose you have been in prison for twenty years, incarcerated since the age of 18. You have no adult experience outside of the penitentiary. Your adult sense of self is terribly limited. Who am I? This question provokes a sense of self that would have you fear your release from prison. All you can do is try to engage life in a way that will permit your identity to take a new shape. You wouldn’t choose to stay in your cell until you can picture who you are. You’d need to engage the outside world and let your identity emerge.”

Well yes, I did stay with my eating disorder for a long time trying to do just that – but hey, I’m on the move now.

He also talks about marriage and the challenge of separating out entangled identities; and the description, again, has a great big resounding chime:

“Upon divorce, they are often confronted with a distressing thought. They say they don’t know who they are. More likely, they don’t know whom they are as a single, autonomous adult, not partnered. Well how could they? Rather than stay frozen in fear, you need to embrace the spirit of wonder and adventure. You’ll get to re-craft your sense of yourself as you engage life in a different way.”

Okay, I know the eating disorder wasn’t a person and the relationship didn’t really start from the premise of love…but it was a co-habitation, and a connection, and a best-friend, however perverse that sounds – so the analogy really makes sense.

He warns against the illusion of knowing ourselves completely, which is a precarious line that me and my over-analysis are close, at times, to tripping over -

“To know yourself so well leaves little room for growth. Even more to the point, it suggests a deep vulnerability that is being defended against. As if it were too dangerous to take a closer look.”

Most importantly, he helps to provide an alternative perspective that I am going to start embracing from now on:

“The universe purportedly exists in a flowing state of potential. And it is essential to understand that we are part of that universe. The goal, then is to access that potential, keeping parts of our identity that serve us well and learning to shed the old, habitual parts that constrain us. This process is known as positive disintegration. This permits us to find balance between the two extremes of identity and enter into a relationship with self –committed to our personal evolution.”

Tags: esteem, Identity, life, self discovery, self-acceptance

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This entry was posted on Thursday, June 3rd, 2010 at 9:42 am and is filed under Identity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.