Journaling project, Day 5

[drwex]

Oftentimes you don’t even realize you’re blocking your own present blessings by holding on to the past. Do your best to let go. You are not your bad days. You are not your mistakes. You are not your scars. You are not your past. Be here now and breathe.

Who are you in this moment, without the baggage?

This sort of thing is the kind that makes me want to tell the speaker "fuck off." Maybe I am my baggage and my scars and my accumulated mistakes. Maybe I wear them proudly because they show I survived shit and did NOT jump off a roof when that urge came strong upon me and I did not drink myself blind to blot out pain and I did not channel my anger into harming myself or others. I am exactly my past - a human being is a vector through time, not a point that exists only in the present. One of the greatest joys in my life right now is looking at the child I'm about to send off to college and simultaneously seeing the tiny baby who curled up on my chest for much of the first three days of that child's life.

I'm not going to pretend my own life was entirely easy, nor that it was as hard as many others. It just is what it is. A misery contest only has losers, no winners. I admit there are probably other ways to live than how I've chosen, given how I got here, but I can't visualize them. This is what therapy is for, I guess.

And who I am without the baggage is... nothing, I suspect. Nobody walks around without baggage; the trick is not to let it weight you down too much, and to figure out how to put such of it down as you can when you can. At a minimum, a person without their "baggage" is a radically different human being. And let's not forget that what's "baggage" in one context is wholly different in another. It's boorish, at best, to bring up your prior marriage at a casual dinner party; however, it's dishonest or worse to try and form a new marriage without discussing what happened in the past with your current partner.

"Baggage" also varies with the times. Prior to 2016 it was true, but not particularly foregrounded in my mind, that my mother-in-law literally fled Europe ahead of Nazi death squads. I can't begin to describe how much that bit of "baggage" has shaped my opinions and reactions in the last 500+ days. Is that "baggage"? Who gets to decide if it is or isn't?

(If you're getting the sense that I'm not doing well with these writing prompts you're probably right. I feel like they're aimed at a different sort of person. I'll keep on with them, at least for a while. But likely not this weekend.)

Comments

[redbird]

I can see an argument that some people only hang onto the bad stuff, and this may be a poorly-phrased encouragement to not obsess over what we could have done better.

In a conversation years ago, when I was looking for vocabulary that didn't assume or imply mind/body dualism, Jon Singer gave me as "we are bodies with histories." From that viewpoint, the time I climbed to the top of Notre Dame de Paris cathedral is as much part of me as the fact that I pushed myself to do it that day because I suspected I might not be capable of it by the next time I was in Paris, if there was in fact a next time. I have the scars from having my gall bladder removed, and also the friends who helped me then.

[goddessfarmer]

I am right there with you. We are the sum of our experiences. How we handle them is important.

[flexagon]

It's a lousy prompt. I'm torn between "right there with you" and "wellllll, people do still sometimes continue with behavior/thought patterns that don't make sense anymore, and it's good to regularly survey what's changed to make sure we're reacting to what's really happening."

[drwex]

Thanks, it's good to have another perspective on the prompt.

I agree we should check in with what we're focusing on, regularly. I just ... enh, there are lots more prompts to come. I'm hopeful some of the others will resonate more.

[coraline]

.... Wait why is it boorish to bring up a former marriage at a dinner party? Am I missing something?

[corylea]

I was wondering that, too (even though I'm still on my first marriage).

[drwex]

Usually dinner parties (unless one is the host) are not about _you_ per se. Bringing up attention-getting things or things that might touch on others hurt feelings is not generally polite. I guess if a past marriage is amicably over and there was no "splitting up the friends" then that's not an issue but most relationships don't seem to end that way.

[coraline]

....I wonder if I am just that oblivious and offending people, or if the people who I have dinner with have very different standards (it wouldn't occur to me not to bring up a past relationship in this context). Certainly Ben will tell anecdotes from his past marriage and that doesn't seem weird to me (and likewise I've brought up stories from past serious relationships in that context...)

[drwex]

I think you and to some degree I move in circles where past relationships, even those that ended in divorces, are more amiable than average. There's at least one person of our mutual acquaintance who feels she cannot speak of a past relationship because the ex and ex's partner overlap in social circles with her.

[corylea]

I do agree with you! But I think the prompt writer was trying to express something, however badly they did so. You are your baggage AND there is a core of you, of who you would be if those things had never happened or if they had all healed. When people feel so overwhelmed by their baggage that they are in danger of jumping off that roof, it sometimes helps to remind them that that core exists, that they are MORE than JUST their baggage.

I am frequently surprised by how very strong and brave and resourceful broken people can be. I sometimes feel worthless in the face of my own brokenness, and my husband looks at me and sees the strength it took not to stick my head in the oven and reminds me that I am strong, even though I don't feel it.

We ARE the sum of everything that we've experienced, AND there is a core of self that is more than those things. That core is often very lovely, and being and accessing that core is part of what makes it worth it to go through dealing with all the crap.

[drwex]

We ARE the sum of everything that we've experienced, AND there is a core of self that is more than those things

I guess I don't see it that way. I think of a person as a cumulative function, the accumulation of all the things that happened to us and how we've responded to them. I think this notion of a "core" self runs to the implication that things can't be changed. The sentence "some people are always that way" strikes me as wrong. I'm not the same person I was in my 20s. I change, and it's both by changing how I respond and by experiencing those different responses that I change myself.

Or so I think.

[corylea]

I'm an introvert. How I choose to express this will be determined by my experiences, but there aren't any experiences that could make me an extrovert. I could be forced to function in a gregarious fashion, but that would still take the toll that too much socializing takes on an introvert. That's the sort of thing I mean.

There are several traits that research suggests are inborn, and those traits prescribe a range of possible behavior. Where we actually fall WITHIN that range is determined by our experiences, but the range itself is not terribly shiftable. Activity level is one such trait. Get a lot of exercise, and you'll shift yourself towards the top of your inborn range; fail to exercise, and you'll shift yourself towards the bottom. Women can often tell what sort of activity level their child will have while that child is still in the womb, since some fetuses move much more than others.

An awful lot of who we are is determined by our experiences, but genes do have their influences, after all. In the Nature vs. Nurture debate, the answer is always Nature AND Nurture. :-)

[drwex]

Without doubting that you are the expert on being you, I'm not certain that there are no things that could make you "be" an extrovert. (Even assuming that's a sensible sentence, which I shall assume for the moment.)

Speaking as someone who is himself now introverted but who was for much of his life extroverted, I feel like that's something changeable. Still, I can see that as a quibble and missing the point, if the assertion is that a person has a core "personality" - whatever that might be. But I don't know how to measure that personality outside the person, except through their behaviors and reactions, which I think are fundamentally a function of past behaviors and actions.

Likewise, I'll accept that there are inborn traits but without knowing how people act on them or in reaction to them I don't know what to make of it.