Definition of Self

It was TOUGH! Oh dear Chuck, I had quite a battle and then quite a windmill to wrestle, had help from my boss, God bless his kind heart, but then it was me and Excel againt the Planet! Boss even said I was all surrounded by Hidrogen and Helium - I was a star. Good, because I was feeling like going Supernova any minute. But then, the A-Team Excel and I made conquered. So, basically I worked my pretty brains off on the job - which gave me such a boost of selfsatisfaction like you have no idea, and which many people would openly call "excesive" since if there is something in this planet I definitively do not lack of, but rather have on insane and almost unhealthy surplus is SELFESTEEM. This being said, yeah, I didn't spend a speck of time thinking about a topic to share with the wide, dark, silent, mysterious, unknown world  behind the screen and down the gutter of the Internet.

So, once the world was OK again, the stars had aligned and it was Peace, I sat here and thought to myself: "Self, shall we blog?", but I had nothing particular in my head to share. So I went to check on Dragonfly's blog, and saw this topic of her, which gave me the Topic of mine. Yeah, kinda like a MEME, only not.

Dragonfly is reading this book that made her think about the elements that define us and our lives ,and found passages in it that confirmed her long honed theory that life turns around relationships.

As you can imagine, individualistic, existentialism Me immediatelly pushed against the idea, even though I realize that relationships do define a lot of people and their lives. However the matter here is how do we define "relationships", and whether such definition applies only to the relationships with others or also includes the relationship with oneself. Starting here, though I do not object the absolute validity of Dragonfly's vision, it is my opinion that the actual definer of oneself and the definer of life and how we live it is the relationship one has with oneself.

Basically the one being we spend most of our time with, therefore it is the one we are in closer contact with, relate to more and so on, is ourselves. You think from your own point of view, process the world the situations, the information always from your own perspective, your point of view, which might be flawedly based on the opinion of someone else, yet it never is exactly someone else's point of view or opinion since you must use your own version, your own understanding, your own "copy" of it.

Our concept of "person" our sense of pain, joy, fear, trust comes from what we feel, what we experience. Even when we "understand" others we do it by piecing up the information we perceive from them and builing it up in ourselves with bits of our own experiences. So, expanding this outwards, our way to relate to others also depend on the way we relate to ourselves. The relationships we build out are deeply influenced by our own relationship with ourselves. For me this is the root to a collection of "traumas" and complexes and emotional needs people have, as for the shortcomings of their relationship with themselves must be compensated with the relationship with others. This is how people who do not love themselves demand so much love and attention from others. Those who feel unsecure crave for security from the relationship with others. Those who can't care about themselves crave to be cared for by others. Those who feel they have a lot of care to give, but there's nothing (in their eyes) to care for about themselves, care so much about others. And so on.

So, if in this sense our relatioship with others is defined by our relationship with ourselves, in the end, what is the element that defines the self and our lives? It's inner, it's the way we see ourselves. We are, in the end, what we see, what we know, what we do of ourselves, and this defines our lives.

Down this line, it is irrational to expect someone else to fix your life, make it better, make you happy, as the source from where your life pours is you and onyl you have access to it, and only you can change it. Thing is that other people's relationships with you do not replace your relationship with yourself, and though it is nice to know others think well of yourself, in the end of the day, the opinion that matters is what you think of yourself. Basing your self image on the opinion of other is a sure shortcut towards depression and possibly suicide, specially since the image others have of yourself is not only incomplete, but also distorted by their own vision. How?

Well, for instance I consider being humble a flaw and being proud a virtue, contrary to the vast majority of people. Thus, there were others would see a humble person as nice and gentle, I would se the exact same person as stupid and worthless. So, someone not knowing how I see the world, what my personal believes are, would think that this person is nice, gentle, but stupid and worthless. Which opinion is valid? All of them, then, this person IS nice, gentle, stupid and worthless? Well, let me give you some insight to the mind of menkind: we are all more prone to believe the bad than the good. So, if this humble person were to base his or her vision of self on the opinion of others, said person would truly believe that he or she is stupid and worthless. But is it?

What matters is what you think of yourself.