You Don’t Seem Yourself
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There is a phrase i hate “you don’t seem yourself’. Ok Ok I take things seriously, too seriously, but that one presses my buttons, ALL of my buttons…ALL my buttons AT THE SAME TIME.
I have spent years trying to find a way to express my self and not be too grating on others, I have engaged in therapy and offering therapy to others, sometimes i think, perhaps imagine I am really together, everythings cool and then someone says that phrase……arrrggghhh!
May be its that they have spotted that I am just pretending to be myself and I hate to be found out! Is my self so fragile, probably not!
Who you are can be a life long search for something that is staring you in the face, in the end its what you do with it that matters. I walked away from the conflict with the person that said this, because i trusted myself and the other person. I have learnt from past mistakes that it is better to walk away and ”time-out“….with a little space and recovery time you can find that the self is a lot stronger than you thought and that most arguments are really about nothing much at all, or because you are tired or didn’t say what you wanted or needed in the first place in a way that the other could hear, but hey thats just my experience.
”If This Is a Man / The Truce“ (Primo Levi)
Think of it this way, when Primo levi talked about the man at Auschwitz who after the first day had buttons on his jacket and wire to hold up his trousers and seemed to have got a shave, he was talking about something important, this man he reckoned was acting like a survivor, looking like a survivor, and therefore he felt was much more likely to survive than many others who just gave up, he was programming him self and others to see him in a particular way. When Louise hay writes about say ”I approve of myself“ 200 times a day or more or that our thoughts and feelings paint the canvas of our lives, she is talking about a reprogramming.
These two examples show how we can effect others view of ourselves and change our own inner view. However there is a lot to undo, in a camp where you are marked for death, or in alife where as children we are often programmed with negative phrases handed down through generations, without anyone thinking about it.
For me one of these phrases is ”you don’t appear to be yourself today“, or ” you are not looking yourself“, or ”thats not like you“ and so on, these appear to me to all be simple subtle denials (very often from really concerned/caring people) of your real self. Its not obvious but it has a drip drip effect. My experience has been that in the end these statements are really directions on how to deny aspects of yourself that others find uncomfortable. You are upset….comment oh dear, you really aren’t yourself today, as if you..your self, could not be upset, so it must be someone else, or a part of you that does not belong to the self, that you are therefore not responsible for??
Hell that might be far to intellectual on such a simple phrase, but it gets me every time….hmm I am really not feeling myself today…..arrrgghhhh.
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