Defining Features

  

To what extent do we define ourselves by the things that other people tell us? If we hear the same stories about ourselves often enough, they sound so familiar they start to have a ring of truth. And when they come from a voice of authority, they arrive even the first time we hear them with the stamp of firm fact rather the fluff of opinion to be taken or brushed aside.

Of these tales we hear, what do we decide and take on board and what do we ignore? Do some of them strike an immediate chord, so we allow them to strike home and set up residence in our definitions of ourselves? Or are they insidious, creeping under the carpets, fingering their way through the patches of soft mortar in our self-protection, winding their way in to our minds like poison ivy?

When you know a little bit about people, the truths they tell you about themselves don’t always seem to be quite right. It makes me wonder.

“I’m unlucky in love”, he frowned. Doomed to be unrequited and never get the girl I wanted. Did he believe his own story so much that he married a girl who wasn’t The Very Thing, having convinced himself that what he wanted was out of range? Did he meet the right girl, but still feel dissatisfied because if he had managed to snare her, she must by definition, be wrong?

“I’m never satisfied”, he said. And it became a self-fulfilling prophesy, as what he had never felt like it was enough, because he couldn’t recognise contentment when it wrapped its warm blanket around his soul.

“I’ve never really loved anyone, never been in love”, he confessed. He gave it lots of other words: infatuation, fondness, friendship, affection, respect, lust. Madness, even. A rose by any other name never smells quite as sweet, after all.

“I don’t love my stepson as if he were my own blood-child”, he told me. He didn’t expect to, because he was told he wouldn’t. Love only blossoms in your heart when you give it permission to grow, after all, when you acknowledge it and welcome it and nourish it.

“I’m hard to love”. Accepting this as fact, she has formed relationships with a series of men over her life who are (pick one or more from this list):

• Too logical and scientific to fall in love with anyone
•  Too much in love with themselves to give any of it away
•  Too convinced they can’t fall in love to consider the possibility
•  Too careful to run the risk of opening themselves up to a complicated love-affair
•  Too in love with someone else
•  Too shy to talk about their feelings

Is it possible to write new stories for oneself? I’m a writer, after all, how good would I have to be to convince myself? I know I have the power to convince other people to believe new stories about themselves – but only because these stories are true anyway.

Tell a man he’s fantastic in bed, and it makes him hard. Tell him he’s hard, and feel him get harder. Tell a man he’s interesting and he will open up and fascinate you with things he’s never talked about to anyone before. Tell a man he’s funny and he’ll relax and make you laugh.

Tell yourself you’re easy to love, though, and it’s still subject to supporting evidence. Isn’t it. No-one will fall in love with a darky, rusty, undersea machine. Better never to find out.

Isn’t it surprising the lengths that people will go to, to fit into their own story? Well, me at least.