A few days ago, I deactivated my Facebook account. I've been on Facebook since 2005? 2006? Who knows. I'm not leaving forever but I need to be away. I need to be away from a lot of things that, unfortunately, can't and won't go away so easily. It was a small step that in the end might not mean much or be long-lasting. I got an email today from a site called Storyworth, which allows family members to connect and share stories of the past. My mother has been writing wonderful responses to various prompts that have been sent to me and these have been the highlights of my week as of late. When I received the email today, the first thing I wanted to do was share it; then I remembered what I'm trying to do; what I need to do. This piece is very personal but also something so universal. It somehow feels alright to post this and maybe it will help...even a little:
(This entry is kind of “philosophical” rather than narrative and rather talky, but very important to me in the way I view the world.)
I believe both. I believe that people do change, definitely, as they go through life and have different experiences, relationships, losses, successes, disappointments and challenges which can bring changes in perspective as they mature. I also believe that people remain who they are intrinsically on some level, though the ways in which consciousness, will, health, age and stage of life can all combine to change behaviors, expectations, and satisfactions.
I just heard a dear friend say today that she is not the same person she was 9 months ago before she learned of her husband’s grave illness, cared for him, lost him, memorialized him and grieves for him while continuing in her life. On some level, this is true. She certainly cannot behave the same way she did, does not feel the same way she did, does not have the same outlook or expectations she had before that day. Different individuals experience themselves in different ways. She expresses feeling like she is a different person. I tend to experience myself as the same person in whom different aspects may overtake other aspects at critical times. At those times I may not have access to the overtaken aspects. But I tend to feel I’m still me.
As a Dance Therapist I believe that we never fully lose our issues but through gaining insight and totally acknowledging and safely expressing our often problematic feelings we can recognize long standing patterns and influence the degree to which they affect current behaviors, attitudes and relationships.
I also believe that through greater understanding of how vast and complicated experience is, of how much joy and misery, abundance and deprivation, hope and despair, possibility and limitation our lives can contain we can begin to be able to hold these contradictory and opposite elements simultaneously rather than separately as black/white or either/or.
I also believe in the serendipitous possibility of a person, idea, event, connection, awareness, knowledge presenting itself at a time that makes a seemingly impossible change of perspective possible which can encourage a change of behavior, action or choice. I don’t believe this is absolutely always given, but that it is always a possibility.
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