Had one slice sugar-free toast with light cream cheese and one tsp lemon curd, one cup coffee with skim milk and molasses, and one Hershey's kiss after posting last night, as I was very hungry and couldn't get to sleep.
I had a revelation this morning that had some relation to the process of weight loss, and I thought I'd share it in case anyone else found the concepts useful. You see, nearly every morning, at present, I sit down and I write out three pages. It's part of a creativity-recovery program called The Artist's Way, and while I'm not sure whether my creativity is going or coming, I've found the practice of writing in the mornings to be good in itself.
To explain what I realized this morning, I need to mention a psychoanalytic concept called the mirror stage. It's an idea that explains childhood development. The infant, who cannot yet stand on her own, looks at herself in the mirror and there sees an image of the complete, independent self. That image is internalized, and what is {I]before[/I] that stage becomes partial, incomplete. The main thing to remember is that this is a metaphor, but it's a very useful one.
One thing that really considering this, particularly as relates to the self-images that we see reflected back at us from others, revealed to me is that I still believe in the complete self and the partial past. And that's a very dangerous conception—you see, part of the process of analysis is to break through these imaginary concepts like the mirror stage and into the symbolic. If I believe that my present is complete and my past is partial, then that makes change akin to backsliding into an immature self.
Think about it, after all, all that the word mature connotes. It suggests that there was a self in the past that was incomplete, and it suggests that the mature is static and unchanging—that it is a complete self that will only yield to decay in old age.
The idea of maturity tells us that if we want to change something about ourselves, or if we succeed in changing something about ourselves, then we are still immature, still not "there" yet.
But that's not true—we construct ourselves day by day, both physically and emotionally. Those days, in the aggregate, make up our lives, our "complete" selves, but they are not homogenous.
But we're still wedded to the idea of the mature, complete self. So if we let other people see that we're still constructing ourselves—that we're working to lose weight and change our habits—that we're still a work in progress, then we're confessing to immaturity, incompleteness. We're contrasting our incomplete selves with what we imagine to be the complete, mature selves of others. That's frightening, because as children, we were often discounted for being immature. "You'll understand when you're older," we were told. "This is just a phase." With the implicit idea that we were incomplete and lacking because we didn't understand, because we were having "phases" of change. We don't want to be discounted—we want to be mature, autonomous individuals.
But we are—and by constructing our best selves, through healthy nutrition and exercise, we're taking control of our own becoming, of what our days are and of what that ultimate "complete" aggregate of days will be.
Anyway, I just wanted to put that out there for anyone else who, like me, may be having trouble with being ashamed of this process (even as we are proud for doing well and making good changes in our lives). These changes don't invalidate who we were, any more than reaching our goals will validate who we are. We have to allow ourselves, our eternally changing selves, to be enough, and then guide those selves in the best paths possible.
