Somewhere in the Leftovers: Theories on Self-Definition

So today I'm just going to start with my essay because it reflects a rather big change in my life. I chopped all my hair off. Yep, all gone. Snip, snip, snip, gone. Traumatic I think yes, worth it? For what I've learned, definitely. By the way, I also just got married as many of you already know, but I just want you to know that I haven't forgotten (not exactly possible) but I will be posting in that vein of the topic very soon. :) Oh and the other pictures are of my brother Tanner, husband Spencer, and me hiking the Narrows in Zions Canyon.

Somewhere in the Leftovers

Theories on Self-Definition

The influence of perception upon one's self-definition has not long been an intriguing idea to me. That is, until today. My crisis, which led to my curiosity, began by looking into a mirror. It is surely a singular experience to look into a mirror and not recognize the visage staring back, to question who I am because of what I see or perhaps what I do not, led me to wonder at the foundation by which I perceive and define myself. This wonderment began because today, in fact, is the day I cut off nearly all of my beautiful red hair. I suppose it truly isn't so drastic, dramatic, or devastating as I seem to feel, whilst sporting a "short-haired" pixie cut (perhaps more commonly known as the boy-cut). But, even so, I felt as though I had suffered a double blow, losing my femininity and self-definition in one swift cut. 

But why? A close friend had accompanied me to the session and left me with nothing but validating comments. My husband also loved my hair, reassuring me for hours of his love and "still-alive-and-well" attraction. But in the quiet moments, I still had doubts and felt near sorrow at my self-inflicted fate. Why? 

After less than thorough consideration, I have formulated some theories on the workings of self-perception. It seems as though self-perception is a condition not only felt by everyone but felt both in the imagined expectations of an onlooking crowd and the internal solidarity of a pondering self-consciousness. These influences, external and internal, are the opinions that formulate our definitions of who we are. Yet, our perceptions of each and the importance we lay in them, reflect the one which we choose to more wholly cling to and our resulting dependence upon a consistent good opinion. 

Then I was led to question whether an emphasis on one was better for a person's self-esteem and by extension their self-definition versus an emphasis on the other. No one can deny that as human beings we are affected by both public opinion and personal opinion. But as it is highly unlikely that either could deliver a truly consistent flow of good opinions it seems that self-esteem and self-definition are less reliant on validation and more on sorting truth and error. This is not to depreciate any and all forms of validation. Validation is, after all, the balm by which each human soul is buoyed up and healed. But much like the inability to remain unaffected by either internal or external influence, regardless of one's emphasis, it is as equally impossible to be affected when any form of validation is internally disregarded as either untrue or inconsequential. This disregarding is due to the fact that each person, to one extent or another, has in already formed internal perception which usually reflects not necessarily who we are, but who we believe ourselves to be. Thus, the importance of sifting inside and outside opinion into categories of truth and error. This process is inexpressibly important as only that which we believe to be true can forward to inhibit the progression of our self-perception. 

Before I delve into lengthy and personal examples, I'm sure you've noticed my frequent references to different functions of the self, mainly self-perception, self-esteem, and self-definition. These three functions are inextricably linked, forming the bridge by which our imagined being coalesces with the external presentation of who we want to be. And somewhere between who we think we are, who we wish to be, and who other see we find the emergence of a cycle: the cycle of the self. 

Though each element of the self is able to stand alone, they also simultaneously interact, compressing and eroding from outside influence while also shaping our perceived self. If we were to begin with self-perception we would each enter our own minds. 

Who do you think you are? Is it based on a personal set of opinions or were you told and convinced by others? 

This line of questioning will quickly tell you whether you put emphasis on internal or external opinion. But now you must ask, who's opinion do you most often believe? Your own or others'? Though difficult to answer this question will reveal the malleability of your perception which can become more malleable the more one more readily believes outside opinion. After all, a thousand different opinions is a bit more unstable than just one. 

Now we turn to self-esteem. In short, self-esteem is the external display of internal belief. If your self-perception is easily influenced by external influences you esteem may fluctuate rapidly. If you are more internally influenced it is quite possible that your esteem will seldom change, depending of course on your own changeability. Either way, this link must be mediated with an accurate judgment of the truth so as to sure up strengths, recognize weakness, and obtain true self-awareness, remaining unhindered by one's self or otherwise. 

And finally, we turn to self-definition. For me, this is where my self-awareness began. Not realizing my lopsided view on truth, which was that the harshest was most likely the most truthful, I rarely believed outside validation and too quickly relied on internal depreciation. In turn, my self-opinion was very nearly marred by a simple haircut. Why? you may ask. It seems that self-definition is often expressed by picking an external feature that reflects an internal quality. For example, femininity might be expressed by chic clothes for one, a knack for homemaking skills for another, kindness, giggling, make-up, or even long hair. For me, it was the long hair. Without even realizing it I had bestowed my entire feminine identity within the length of my hair. Ridiculous? Yes. Common? Unfortunately. 

Now for some backstory. I have always perceived myself as rather tom-boyish. No one could persuade me otherwise. I liked being a tom-boy and I was fine with that. I have also always been told that long hair is a sign of femininity and short hair is a boyish or lesbian style. Though I didn't really believe either claim I obviously, upon retrospection, tucked both gently away as possible truth. But regardless of the truth, I eventually wanted to become more feminine and ever since I've felt that I could use as much feminine help as I could get. Well, about a year ago I decided I wanted to get a pixie cut. And after a year of careful consideration and patient waiting, I did it, all the while claiming that I really wasn't that attached to my hair so it wouldn't be a big deal. I might have been fine. Though it was a shocking change to witness, my femininity still felt intact and any previous external opinion had been ignored and abandoned. But then as I got up to leave the salon my hairdresser reminded me to always style my hair or I'd look like a boy or a lesbian...and we wouldn't want that, would we? 

In one swift moment the possible became true, my femininity vanished, and my self-esteem tanked. For a few days, despite my husband's best efforts, I was determined to think I looked like my thirteen-year-old brother. And I was miserable. And even though that's probably still true, I sat down and started writing and soon my perspective changed. As I reflected I found myself in an unnecessary rut. Everyone I'd talked to, even my family, had loved my hair. My husband guaranteed that I still looked like a girl with or without long hair. All I had to do was decide to believe them. So I did. 

It's true my husband's hair is officially longer than mine. But it doesn't matter. I love my hair. But it no longer means femininity to me. Finding a balance between my opinion and other's opinions is hard, believing good opinion from either is harder. But balance is the only way to maintain a positive and forward progressing self-esteem. And that's who I want to be: always progressing. I am not my hair, but my hair can be me. And perhaps it is only after experiences of self-dissolution that carefully erode at our self-definitions that we can be truly self-aware. Perhaps it is only after we strip away our layers of perception that we are left with the sediments of truth. And maybe it is there that we can find ourselves. Because somewhere in the leftovers of every soul laid bare is the center of who we actually are.

-Natalie Cherie

An Attempt by Living Happily

So this essay is way overdue! To be honest I finished it a couple months ago, right at the end of my study abroad but had simply not taken the time to put it up. So here it is! The assignment was to personalize a poem that touched us in some way or another. With this in mind, I chose John Donne, the metaphysical poet who can talk on everything from sexual tension via fleas to true love regardless of distance in the poem I chose "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." Since there are no picture captions this time around, these pictures are from Spencer's and my honeymoon in Mendocino, California. And finally, with renewed vigor and determination I have two or three essays in the making right now so I should be posting more consistently . . . at least that's my New Year's Resolution in the middle of the year. :) Enjoy!

An Attempt by Living Happily

“Do you miss him?”

In some variation or another, this is the question most frequently asked of me here on my study abroad. And my answer is always the same: “yes.” And true to form the same thought will surely follow: “Oh you can tell...great.”

*

I’ve often felt myself consciously attempting to hide my visible “neediness” in hopes that it would just go away and I would prove stronger than I felt. I remember saying goodbye and hardly shedding a tear. I couldn’t because I knew if I started that my heart was liable to break. This denial of emotion, of which I will later explain the origins, continued for weeks until I was sitting alone; the moment in which my pretense utterly shattered.

I was sitting in a room, my own room, that felt nothing like my own on the campus of East Anglia University in Norwich, England. And I was crying, a lot. I felt dumb for being so emotional over such a silly issue but even so, I was grateful that I had my own room so I could “let it out” this one time. I doubt anyone would have thought the less of me for missing my loved ones, more especially my fiance, but for some reason, I felt almost guilty...selfish even for lacking the gusto to cope with our relatively short separation. For heaven's sake, I was sitting in England and still, I was mourning. I felt ridiculous. But looking back now, perhaps it more disturbing than feeling ridiculous in my sorrow, was that in my sorrow I felt guilt.

*

My acquaintance with mourning is not exactly traditional, but in reality very common. The only person I’ve ever been close to who has passed away was my adopted Grandma down the street. In the moment, I was told that she had finally succumbed to the cancer mourning felt appropriate, necessary even. But I have rarely felt the comfort of “excused mourning” again.

I suppose comfort and sadness are not words commonly used together, so perhaps I should simply learn not to hope for both. But in lieu of cathartic comfort, often found in expressed sorrow, one does not necessarily expect the pangs of guilt either. I suppose my reoccurring guilt began when I was quite young. Our family was just starting, my parent’s marriage was strained from financial pressures too weighty for any. There were times, as I grew up, that I dreamed I could fix all of our “problems”...but I hardly knew where to start. But one day I became disillusioned. I don’t remember why, the day, or the instant, but it was in that moment that I stopped crying. Looking back now I can decipher a strange fissure between the time when I could cry and the time I could not. I imagine that somewhere between those states I realized that if I could not fix our
problems then at least I wouldn’t add to them. I wouldn’t cry or mourn, I wouldn’t be “weak,” and I would never be a problem. Instead, I would stand strong as a haven of calm and support for those who struggled, who might never understand how I truly empathized.

I am still this way though I have since attempted emotional balance. But even now I find no comfort or catharsis from tears and expressed sorrow but rather guilt for having let myself slip and appear weak.

I suppose this isn’t entirely healthy.

*

Well as I sat in Norwich, attempting to be “healthy” and to feel comfortable crying a couple poems came to mind. The first was “Rabbi Ben Ezra” by Robert Browning. The first lines of the poem are permanently etched into my mind since it is with them that Spencer proposed to me. They say, “Grow old along with me!/The best is yet to be,/The last of life, for which the first was made:/Our times are in His Hand/.”

Oh good, I had succeeded in making myself cry more . . . like expected I still felt no better.

It actually wasn’t until much later that I thought to read “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” by John Donne. But when I did I found even the title to be fairly ironic as it seemed to defy the widely-accepted premise (though I am not sure who created such a trend of thought or if it was ever formally agreed upon) that it is human nature to seek validation in one’s present state. Therefore shouldn’t I have been seeking some poorly written “heart-wrencher” song that explained to me in juvenile lyrics that it was okay to cry or some such comforting nonsense? Yet, regardless of what should have been my human instinct or mourning protocol, I decided to read John Donne who explicitly forbade my mourning state.

I wonder if perhaps, mine was an issue of sexist affectation. It seems possible, if not probable, that men feel pressured to by “strong” and in turn find it difficult to cry while women, on the other hand, are nearly expected to be more emotional to the point of making up for man’s lack of emotion in her overbearing capacity.

Maybe in this way, I sought to defy my perceived role and pre-determined reactions. Maybe not. Perhaps instead mine was an issue of independent nature and I simply did not care to feel the neediness which irrevocable followed my tears. Or maybe it really did relate to the emotional and psychological repercussions of a saddened remembrance of what may have been a typical past, and the hopeless outlook that follows a repeated and consistent lack of solutions.

But these “perhaps” and “maybes” were not my concern. At that moment I very little cared for the reasons why I was mourning, nor did I hardly care for the possible reasons I felt guilty while expressing sorrow. I just wanted relief. And I figured if John Donne felt that he could forbid mourning as a whole, then I wanted to know how he thought it could be done.

As I read I found a series of three perspectives or rather paradigm shifts that served to nearly eradicate one’s desire to mourn and replaced the tendency with an “innocent mildness” that accepted it’s state of being. The first was what I would call the Profination of Spiritual Love, the second: The Expansion of the Soul, and third: The Anchor of Two Separate Souls Intertwined.

If I were to break down the phrase “Profination of Spiritual Love” basically I would say that John Donne is convincing his wife or love to “make no noise” because “tear-floods, [and] sigh-tempests move” none but rather serve as a “profanation of our joys.” In other words tears and sighing degrade their continual happiness. In the following two stanzas, a contrasting correlation is created between two types of couples, the first being “Dull sublunary lovers.../(whose souls is sense) cannot admit/Absence, because it doth remove/Those things which elemented it.” The second couple (Donne and his wife) are immediately elevated as he describes them as, “But we by a love so much refined,/That ourselves know not what it is,/Inter-assured of the mind,/Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.”

The apparent contrast is immensely effective as any lover desires to be of “a love so much refined.” But Donne’s true point was made when he explains their actions. The first couple who, “Moving of th’ earth” with their mourning brought “harms and fears.” Whereas the second with “trepidation of the spheres,/Though greater far” remained “innocent.”

As I thought through this first paradigm shift it seemed to me that I could rid my sorrow on the basis of wanting to be in possession of the most refined and true love. I suppose Donne had a good point in proving this perspective to be a potential avenue but it simply remained uncompelling to me because honestly, I didn’t care if I proved my love, I just missed Spencer. So I moved to the second perspective.

The second paradigm shift is embodied in just one stanza but is perhaps my favorite of the poem. It reads, “Our two souls, therefore, which are one,/Though I must go, endure not yet/A breach, but an expansion,/Like gold to airy thinness beat./” This concept of expansion was first told to me by Spencer. This was not the first summer we had been apart. The previous summer he had gone on a four-month study abroad to the Jerusalem Center. It was during that time that he first expressed not feeling so far distant or separate but expanded. These were my first thoughts when I read John Donne’s similar assertion. It is actually this perspective which kept me from crying in the moments where I felt the need to. So lovely was the image of airy-thin sheets of gold I felt as though I could not cry but rather be grateful that Spencer’s and my love for each other was capable of withstanding the beating process of expansion. Yet, in one word I did differ, dramatically. Because I did feel a breach. Spencer’s existence and influence in my mind and even on my actions had expanded past the Atlantic Ocean but I still felt the viable absence of his physical presence. And so though I found partial comfort in Donne’s beautiful articulation I still felt the need to mourn and the guilt for the times I had.

Thus, I turned to the final perspective which was the Anchor of Two Separate Souls Intertwined. Here Donne uses a beautiful metaphor of two souls being the feet of a compass. One foot remains fixed and connected, not by location but longing, and as the other foot moves and wanders they lean in tandem and follow with a loyalty unparalleled. In a closing word, Donne says, “Thy firmness makes my circle just,/And makes me end where I begun.” And I felt calm.

I suppose in the end the question was never whether or not I should feel guilty for mourning the absence of half my heart. In the end, it was simple, though our love would expand across the ocean of insurmountable separation I could not help but lean after and long for our reuniting. Thus I would always desire to come home. But I did not have to mourn. I did not need to wonder whether or not people knew or felt sorry for me. I did not need to cry behind a closed door for fear of feeling weak. And if I did decide to mourn for a moment I did not need to feel guilty for doing so. I suppose “being emotionally healthy” is a how-to question I may never answer, but at least, for the time being, I was able to find solace in the words of a poet who knew what it meant to miss and the way in which to continue living. How? In essence, happily.

-Natalie Cherie