#idea of self

[alittlelifenovelquotes]

“[His] vision, his version of himself was singular to the point of being delusional.”

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Part V: The Happy Years. Chapter 1, pg. 464

[bumsquash-blog]

Deal with two things, auto-fat phobia and your idea of self

Get rid of fat phobia from your mind.

But also check your idea of self, or self conceptualization. That is the way you see yourself. i.e. do you have a tendency to immediately feel, you’ll be incompetent/inadequate/incompetent, that sort of thing.

You may need to find out, does drag you down, or does it enable and serve you?

Have you got into the habit of using your (idea of) self as the punchbag for any disappointment of any kind? In other words do you attack yourself as a safety valve/ to stop yourself from attacking others?

Are you afraid of your anger/expressing it? That you’ll go too far and do harm to others/yourself?

Things like this fuel neuroses of all kinds like anxiety, depression, excess hunger [because its so draining to energy].

Correcting your idea of self will be even more important than auto- fat phobia for some of you. A bad IoS is like viral software corrupting your hard drive.

To check, try suspending all internal judgement on yourself for long enough to observe the difference. Try it for at least a few days to give it a chance to work.

If it makes a difference then you know you need to change the way you conceptualize yourself.

[synaptic-jive-blog-blog]

Walking aimlessly.

After a discussion with my expository writing professor about my essay, he noted, 

"You execute ideas marvelously. You do it very well... But you distance yourself."

When asked to discuss the relationship between intimacy and efficacy, I couldn't say what I rehearsed for interviews. I had to be me.

And that was incredibly difficult.

Even when I did explain, I had too many formalisms in my language. I frequently spoke in the second-person.

He then noted, after being thoroughly displeased with my responses, that it is utterly tragic that I consider an anecdote discussing my idea of success as intimate. Intimacy, in his opinion, involves other parties; I was only involving myself.

We were asked to write a dramatic scene about a moment in our lives, and he said, "You decided to write about a Portuguese man, not yourself. Why is that?"

It hit me then that I was distancing myself from everything, from my writing to how I tell stories. 

Do I distance myself from people?

"This is like therapy!" I laughed.

I walked out of 411 Lafayette hollow, and I felt like my feet were strapped to two slabs of iron. I went to the bookstore, then the record store. I bought two compilations.

I don't understand. I felt like he grabbed a piece of my soul, ripped it out of my chest and threw it on the table. 

How am I supposed to feel? How do I write about this? How am I going to be graded on this?