week 30
my role self took over…
I recently read about internalizers vs. externalizers, and how internalizers often go through life acting through their role selves, or the identity adopted to fulfill others’ expectations. I feel suffocated by my role self, and I think it has been making me gradually sicker for a long time. My role self is the one who volunteers for extra duties I have no passion for or investment in. It’s the self that always serves others before myself, even if the undertone of it reeks of resentment. My role self is the one that sticks around trying to please the wrong people, is addicted to external validation and only gets fed by sacrificing the desires of my true self. In simplest form, my role self is the helper while my true self is the creator.
I realized that it isn’t that my creator self is lazy, or timid, or a natural procrastinator. My creator self just gets crowded out by my role self which rarely ever stops, and drains me of every last creative drop of energy. My role self jumps in the way because it feels the need to protect my true, creator self, and can convince my creator that it will be able to do a better job creating freely once role self finishes every task on the to do list, makes enough money doing practical things, and earns enough praise to take a break.
The role self goes on overdrive with the back-to-school season, the family reunion I’d been working toward all summer, the needs of family members living close by. It is relentless and it is exhausted, and meanwhile my true self is lying around gasping for nourishment and space and time and connection.
I let my role self lead me through this entire summer, and now I am spent and staring down a new school year already burnt out. I need my true self to come out and play, but it has been so pushed aside that she forgets how, and even experimenting and just playing feels like daunting hard work. I guess the last week left of summer will be spent resting and relearning how to play, and everything else can wait.
Fail of the week: family trivia night! My team came in dead last, but I was proud of all our answers and collaboration. I took some guesses and stuck to the answers I definitely knew.