Not Keats.

[mrissa]

Every once in awhile I get in a Beautiful Food Mood. This is the kind of mood that sometimes results in hours in the kitchen chopping and roasting and kneading and generally making a mess. I don't really have the energy for big-time mess-making today, so I fell into sort of a produce-induced trance-state instead. I found myself wiggling over the almost-peppery smell of the grapefruits at Byerly's, and I sang "haricots verts" to the tune of "Nottingham Ale" for the rest of the shopping expedition. (Very quietly under my breath.) (No veggie on earth cooks like haricots verts.) The produce will require very little energy on my part to taste most excellent. I will probably hum to myself while I eat it, too. I get like that. I am not really much of a sucker for artificial packaging in food, but the appearance of produce gets me every time. Also I get ideas of what is the right thing to have. This time it was strawberry ice cream made with liquid nitrogen. The people who make ice cream with liquid nitrogen have my business anyway (it's SO GOOD), but suddenly strawberry was just It.

Also there was a black leather miniskirt online for 75% off; what was a girl to do? It was only available in my theoretical size. I was looking for a half-remembered red silk miniskirt, but as I didn't find it...well, leather goes with boots, right? Sure it does. And if it doesn't fit right, back it goes. (I tried on such a skirt from a different manufacturer some years ago. It was a subject of some hilarity, because it fit absolutely perfectly up to where the hips started to curve in again towards the waist, and then I could have fit a baby kangaroo in the space remaining between me and the skirt. A fairly old baby kangaroo. Possibly a kangaroo toddler. I'm pretty sure that some of you find leather miniskirts hot and some do not, but even those in the "hot" category must see that an ill-fitting leather miniskirt is more amusing than attractive.)

One of you asked -- yes, I'm still on the topics from the night of sleep dep a week ago -- about my "real self." "Tell me about the 'real you,'" this person asked, and she was sensible enough to use the quotation marks. Here's the thing: it's all the real me. Am I my "real self" with strangers? Sure I am: part of what's really me is the urge not to tell some stuff to strangers.

I noticed recently that I was slightly different when having dinner with markgritter, timprov, dd_b, lydy, and pameladean than when having dinner with the same group minus the Pamela. Was one more or less real? More or less relaxed or honest or genuine? No. They were just different. Being the Pamela's friend is not the same as being anybody else's friend, because she is the Pamela and not anybody else, and this seems like it should be obvious. So it's not the same being a Mris around the Pamela than not around the Pamela. So of course I wouldn't act quite the same.

For some people this gets a lot more complicated around relatives. I will pick on seagrit because she's here (virtually speaking): I am my real self around my sister-in-law. Do I tell her everything? Of course not. You can never tell any one person everything. If you could, you wouldn't be thinking enough, because you need to think more and faster than you can talk. And, for example, markgritter's is not the kind of family where sisters-in-law would sit down together and one would say, "Hoo, you wouldn't believe what your brother did in bed last night!" That's not less real. It's just not an area in which we enjoy discussion -- in which our real, true selves enjoy discussion.

So sometimes people I like don't know how glad I am to see them, because I am repressing my Golden Retriever puppy reactions -- but that choice to repress those reactions is really me, too, not just the joyful internal slobbering on people's shoes. Is my real self like a Golden Retriever pup? Yes, and also not like.

For some people -- not, I think, for this questioner in specific -- the idea of a "real self" is an excuse. You may appear to be a kindergarten teacher, but your real self is a ballet dancer. I say, really be both if you want to be. Dance and teach. Paint and sell pool tables. But don't talk yourself into the idea that what you're doing has to do with someone else, because it's all a part of you. Your real self would never speak to someone that way? Then don't. Your real self dreams of a brambled rose garden? Then plant, or at least find out where you'd get the seeds and when and how you'd plant them. Put up or shut up: if you can come up with things that are really you, really do them. Really. That's what real means.

Comments

[sensational.livejournal.com]

Yeah, same here.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

::loff::

[ellameena.livejournal.com]

Hee. Good one!

[(Anonymous)]

I see "real self" as a big red life preserver ring one can hold onto when feeling like drowning.

If one feels like a fish in the water, even the idea of the said life peserver ring seems strange and useless.

Some days, though, one feels like one has just been a big plastic bag that eventually did burst and there are of course many colorful pieces, but none of them is real and all of them are borrowed.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Dear anonymous stranger: I think that if one is too much at odds with one's concept of one's "real self," it's a sign that something needs fixing. Sometimes it's attitudes about life and work and survival, sometimes it's an actual change in circumstance. But as a status quo, the gap between "real" and actual is not one that can be maintained.

I've been miserable and out of place at various points in my life. But my real self was indeed miserable and out of place -- that's how I really was. It wasn't something I could disconnect from myself -- nor should it have been. If, for example, I'd clung to the notion that physics was what my real self did, I would have done myself a disservice in trying to pretend that I was happy doing it, and nothing would have been improved thereby.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Re the "real self": well said, and I agree. The only time in my life I haven't been my real self was when taking the drug Bactrim. I don't know who that person with the roller-coastering mood swings was, but it sure wasn't me.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And apparently you were able to take steps to change that drug, and I'm glad. I think various things can separate us from the real selves we'd like to be, and it's good when we have the ability to adjust those. I think it can work the opposite way, too: some people fit their own self-concepts much better on a medication than off it. To take a trivial example, I am much more the way I think of myself when I have my daily iron supplements than when I don't. I spend less time with the room spinning around me, and that will certainly affect how I approach the rest of the world.

Sometimes people don't have that option. I've known families who had to keep reminding themselves that when Uncle X was himself, he would never have said or done whatever it was, and that's always very sad indeed.

This post

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

This is one of the best thought out and carefully reasoned (and well written) posts I've ever read on LJ. I'm going to think about this. (Certainly, this would not be the kind of "thinking about" that really boils down to figuring out how best to articulate the opposite side!) I do feel, sometimes, as though I can be more or less genuine; Nate the transcrip-tionist is a real person and a real version of me, as is Nate the musician, but I've had at least one day job where it felt as though I was being paid for living a lie. And this kind of compromise of integrity could not possibly be worth it in the long run; I spent the last couple of months trying to figure out how and when to just get out, so I could go back to being Nate again. Eventually, I just gave notice and left.

Nate Bucklin

Re: This post

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, I think I've said similar things in less condensed form to other commenters: if you find that what you're really doing is not how you really see yourself, it's time to stop! If you'd kept the job where you felt you were being paid for living a lie, you would really have become a version of Nate who was willing to make that tradeoff, in one form or another.

Re: This post

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

And thanks, of course, for your kind words.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Makes a lot of sense to me.

A related thing that bugs me is the idea of "finding youself", as if you're not right there all along. I don't think a self is a thing that's laying there, as the end of a journey along some remote road, waiting to be found and put on, I think it's built of all the things you feel and do and think along the way. All of them, as you say.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yah, don't find yourself. Make yourself.