Embracing otherness. When I first heard this theme, I thought, well, embracing otherness is embracing myself.
And the journey to that place of understanding and acceptance has been an interesting one for me, and it's given me an insight into the whole notion of self, which I think is worth sharing with you today. We each have a self, but I don't think that we're born with one.
You know how newborn babies believe they're part of everything; they're not separate? Well that fundamental sense of oneness is lost on us very quickly.
It's like that initial stage is over — oneness: infancy, unformed, primitive. It's no longer valid or real.
What is real is separateness, and at some point in early babyhood, the idea of self starts to form. Our little portion of oneness is given a name, is told all kinds of things about itself, and these details, opinions and ideas become facts, which go towards building ourselves, our identity.
And that self becomes the vehicle for navigating our social world. But the self is a projection based on other people's projections.
Is it who we really are? Or who we really want to be, or should be?
So this whole interaction with self and identity was a very difficult one for me growing up. The self that I attempted to take out into the world was rejected over and over again.
And my panic at not having a self that fit, and the confusion that came from my self being rejected, created anxiety, shame and hopelessness, which kind of defined me for a long time. But in retrospect, the destruction of my self was so repetitive that I started to see a pattern.
The self changed, got affected, broken, destroyed, but another one would evolve — sometimes stronger, sometimes hateful, sometimes not wanting to be there at all. The self was not constant.
