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How do we define ourselves?
Dear Creatrix,
How are you doing today? Welcome to week four, our last week of the body chapter.
I hope you rested a little. I hope you took some time to let all this new information arrive in your body. I hope you took some time to reflect and integrate – and to imagine your ideal or desired future.
In the first week, we looked at how we think about ourselves and our bodies, and we started to tune in a bit more to how we feel and what our body wants to tell us.
From there, we’ve moved to letting go of thoughts and beliefs that limit us in our ability to heal and thrive, and found some new ways of seeing things – and how to heal ourselves.
We also started thinking about how much we move and how much we would like to move from now on, and started setting up a new routine accordingly.
With this, I think we have created a solid basis for living healthy and happy lives in our bodies here on earth.
Today, I would like to take us back to the exercise with the bubbles, which we did in the first week and see how we can use this to relate to other people, in new ways.
In this exercise, we asked ourselves:
How do we see ourselves in this world, or how do we think other people see us?
I remember playing a version of this as a get to know each other game at a conflict management training that I attended in Georgia (the country), with participants from all around Europe and the Middle East.
We walked around and compared our pieces of paper with each other and looked at where we matched with other people.
I remember how there was only me and another participant from Egypt who wrote human on their worksheet (instead of male or female) and we had a special moment when we found our match.
At that point, I chose the word human as I didn’t want to be identified as male or female, I found it so incredibly important to be met beyond that binary, as I experienced it as an insult to be called a woman, because of all the harassment that I endured as one, and I felt happy to meet someone who, I thought, felt similarly and who questined gender roles as well.
Over the course of the training, however, it turned out, that his reasons for writing human were very different from mine.
He was very outspoken against homosexuality and/or questioning gender roles because he had learned that it wasn’t allowed or accepted in his religion. So I realized that while we chose the same word, we did not mean the same thing.
The reason I am sharing this with you is that I want you to become aware, that while we might be using the same words and descriptions for ourselves and other people, they might not mean the same thing for all of us.
When I identify as a woman, it might not mean the same to me as it does to you.
We might think of some similarities, but we might also think of very different things, depending on how we grew up and what we have experienced so far in life.
When I was a young student of Cultural Anthropology, I was fascinated by the work of Margaret Mead, who directed my focus on the fact that the markers for being male and female are different in different cultures.
She wrote very interesting books about that – check them out if you are curious.
And different expressions of gender are also something that I experienced on different occasions when I travelled around the world.
I especially remember one moment in Kyiv, Ukraine in the early 2000s, when another German friend of mine (female identified and hetero, but tall and with short hair) and I went into a church, and they kept telling her to take off her hat (we were there in winter, and it was freezing cold), so when they told her, I took mine off as well, but to me, they said I had to put it back on.
We were confused, until we figured out that they read her as a man.
A kid from there also only believed that she was a woman after we went to the toilet together, and she could ‘see’ – but no one in Germany would ever not read her as female.
The same way, my brother, in Germany, remarked that all the women in my pictures looked like men because they had hairy legs and moustaches, something that would not make people in Ukraine question their femininity.
I also remember all the kids in Ukraine laughing at me, when they saw my shaved armpits, as they had never seen that before. They just lived with their body hair there, at them time. And that was a lovely experience for me as well.
There are so many things we take for granted because it’s all we know, and travel is such a great way to see things differently.
What this brings to our awareness is that the meaning we give to something depends on what we have learned and experienced.
We grow up with certain beauty norms, we grow up believing that men are better at this and women are better at that or whatever else we think. We might grow up with prejudices or not. We might think some things are better than others – yet none of that is universally true or so – it’s just how we learned to see our part of the world.
According to that, we also create a certain set of beliefs about ourselves.
We think we are either athletic or not, we think we can do some things, but we can’t do others.
We also often believe that, because of certain attributes which people have assigned to us, at some point in our lives, we now have to be in certain ways, or we build our identities by rebelling against these ideas.
We may think that we are broken beyond repair, or we may think that we have all it takes to thrive.
Like a diagnosis a doctor gives us, these ideas about ourselves are here for us to question them, and not to accept them unquestioned. We can choose which ones serve us and disregard the rest. One by one, bit by bit.
We get to decide.
If we don’t like a belief that we have about ourselves, especially if it hurts, limits or harms us, we can change it, and with it, we will change our lives.
