Thoughts

[brigdh]

You know, it's funny how your perceptions of yourself changes.

I was reading back through the first few entries in this journal looking for something, and they're entirely recognizable as me. Which seems strange, because of course I wrote them, but that was four years ago; I didn't expect to see the exact same emotions and responses expressed. And though I like to think that I can write much better now, and therefore my entries now are more coherent and interesting, I still get annoyed at the same things, in the same way, I'm still amused by the same things. I even stumbled over this entry, which is so obviously the start of all the later entries I would come to write about rain and full moons and early morning light that it's startling.

But what I expected to see was someone else entirely. Lately, I've had this huge sense of change in myself; I feel like I changed dramatically in the last six months or year, though I don't know why or how and can't put my finger on exactly what might have changed. I keep thinking about it though, wondering in other contexts about how much a person can change, and how the way you define yourself affects the way you act, and how various people can perceive the same person differently.

I do, and always have, thought about myself as a nice person, but I don't mean quite the same thing by that as most people do. I just mean that, all other circumstances being equal, I'll do what I can to help other people. Not out of some sense of obligation or guilt or anything, but just because anything else is stupid. On the other hand, I was talking to my family the other day, because my brother was in trouble for having told a parent of one of the other kids on his baseball team to go fuck himself. And my dad was saying that they knew the guy must have really deserved it, because John was too nice to do that lightly. "Not like you," he added. "You're mean." Which was mostly a joke, but also is... kind of true. I'm never polite just for the sake of being polite; I'm too stubborn to do things I don't like. If someone does manage to make me angry, then yeah, I'm going to tell them. It's something I know about myself now, but it's not something I would have thought true a few years ago. But if my family is calling me on it, it must have always been there.

So maybe I haven't changed at all. I was depressed, severely, for a very long time, and I only started coming out of it about two years ago, in the fall of '04. I could just be finally settling in to who I am. Which is a strange thought, that I could have been hurt for so long that just to be normal feels new.

So... I don't know! What do you all think? Does the way you think about yourself change the way you actually are?

Comments

[p-zeitgeist.livejournal.com]

Does the way you think about yourself change the way you actually are?

Short and glib answer? Hell, yes.

The degree to which it changes who you are, or can change who you are, probably has certain fixed limits. But it seems pretty clear to me that it does work, and can work in startlingly dramatic ways.

But here's an anecdote/illustration for you. My very first real job was as, essentially, an executive assistant. Every so often I had to go out and meet the public as Miss Assistant, and I was a shy and awkward girl. Then some dramatic corporate politics happened, and suddenly the executive was gone and I was the person doing everything he'd previously done. There was some general industry attention, and I was once again meeting the very same public who'd met me as Miss Assistant mere months before.

And I was a different person. I was poised and authoritative and reasonably outgoing; when I spoke people shut up and listened without my consciously doing anything to make them. Part of it came from inside, initially; part of it certainly came from outside, in that people were treating me differently; but even that changed things from the inside because it created a kind of feedback loop. I could feel myself being a different person -- using my body differently, doing different things with my voice -- and even though I was aware of it on some level, it was happening without anything by way of conscious effort or decision.

I tend to think that this, like so much else, will ultimately turn out to have a neurochemical explanation: that the way you think about yourself affects what your body and brain are doing by way of making and using all those chemicals. But whether that's what's going on or not, I think it's a real phenomenon.

Also? When you're coming out of a long illness, feeling normal does seem new. It's an amazing thing, like waking up in a brand new world.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about! Especially "using my body differently, doing different things with my voice"; it feels so subtle, except that it's not, really, it's big changes, but ones that are hard to be aware of on a conscious level.

It's an amazing thing, like waking up in a brand new world.

Yeah. It's nice, though also kind of depressing, to think that you hadn't noticed before how much the world you were living in sucked.

[mistressrenet.livejournal.com]

Also? When you're coming out of a long illness, feeling normal does seem new. It's an amazing thing, like waking up in a brand new world.

Mmm, yes. Very much so. "Hey, sunlight looks like this? Who knew?"