on self-concept and change

Fixed...

Around about twenty-four or so years ago, when I first started to have fully formed thoughts and memories, I began to develop an idea in my head of what my future would look like. At some point, I stopped conceiving of it as a disconnected set of attributes and started envisioning a complete person. Psychologists call this an Ideal Self-concept, the person you imagine when you imagine your most successful, most actualized self. For me at least, this concept has been pretty resistant to change, even in it's most superficial elements.

I was a writer in this fantasy, and always a successful one. I had achieved enough success that I could engage with writing fiction as my full-time job. Oddly, the actual act of writing featured very little; usually I saw myself giving a speech to a small group of fans or doing a book signing. I almost always lived in New York City, and in the few instances when I did not, I lived in downtown Minneapolis. I traveled often. I wasn't overly wealthy, but had enough money in the bank and lived a spartan enough lifestyle that I never, ever had to be concerned about running out of money or not being able to make monthly expenses. I was intelligent, theoretical and academic, but could also abandon those attributes when I wanted to so I could play beer pong with people who didn't have them.

What surprises me is that the oddly specific superficial elements have been the ones that I've clung most closely to and resisted questioning, especially when I was willing to consider alternative possibilities for myself. For example, in every version of the fantasy—whether I am a writer or a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher—I am always wearing an overcoat like this one. Always. Occasionally it's black; usually it's a foot longer than the one in the photo, and if I am not wearing it, then it's close at hand. That this sartorial element refuses to leave is highly curious. In all of the potential futures in which I am successful, my vision of success always includes that minuscule detail as what is essentially a uniform of success. Even now, to attempt to construct a future without it feels, on some level, fundamentally wrong. Why? Am I the Barney Stinson of the overcoat?

I have a similar relationship to cities. Although for school I moved out to what, to me, is a small town, I can't remember any imagined version of myself that was happy and successful and lived further out than a second-ring suburb. I've never seriously considered staying in St. Cloud longer than I have to, and I have an inkling that it has less to do with the town itself than with it not fitting my self-concept. I don't know why I cling to these superficialities, and I don't know whether or not I should. After all, isn't it the more holistic parts of yourself that you ought to draw strength from and anchor other things to?

It took an enormous effort of will to permit myself to change majors from creative writing to fine art. I had to convince myself that I could do the same sorts of things with drawing and painting that I could do with fiction writing, and that the world of art was broader than Duchamp and Pollock, who I couldn't imagine emulating. The resistance to doing something else was and is so strong that just now I had to exert some willpower to change "art" to "fine art" in that first sentence, probably because I conceive of the more specific field as too different from the writerly self-concept I still have. Even in changing majors, I had to prove I wasn't changing my self-concept.

...and Fluid. 

For as long as I have had a self-concept, it has included the idea that the successful me will have found the One True Calling, the thing that keeps a person awake at 3 AM thinking about it and that makes them excited to begin work on Monday morning. The job from which they do not wish to retire.[1]  I've always believed that once I found this thing, doing it would never be hard. If it was writing, I would never resist sitting down in front of the page. If it was art, I would draw constantly. If it was being a teacher, I would stay with students until 10 PM to help them get the most out of their education. And that I would want to do those things.

This is why I would harangue myself about not finishing projects. I viewed my inability to finish a complete novel as a wound to my self-concept of the successful author persona. I wasn't just failing to complete a goal, I was failing to live up to my ideal self.

As I've grown up and matured I've realized that even the most prolific and voluminous writers feel lazy and don't want to write a lot of the time, and even great teachers get frustrated and need to go home. One of the greatest things I've done for my mental health was to stop attributing a kind of legendary willpower to people who have found their calling and started to view "not wanting to write" or "not wanting to draw" as a natural human impulse instead of a moral failing.

But now I'm starting to take that revelation a step further. Maybe that calling doesn't exist as one thing. Maybe the thing that I'm supposed to do in life is to constantly discover new things. If that's the case, it makes sense that I'm not the kind of person who can see a long, arduous project through to completion. "Getting bored with something" isn't about a lack of willpower and isn't a form of giving up, but is my natural impulse to discover as much as I can.

Does this mean my self-concept has changed from "author" to "author/artist" to "creative person of all stripes/adventurer/discoverer"? I don't know. That's one solution to feeling better about your choices and making them fit with who you are. I think it's more likely, though, that my schema for what a-self concept is has changed, from something that is set in stone and that you build your life around into something that can change and that your goals can change to adapt to.

I'm still never getting rid of the coat, though.

[1] For reasons I can't entirely articulate, the value of the search for this thing has been seared into me at the deepest level. It probably has to do with a combination of the values of the broader culture and growing up with a mother who would come home from work sobbing 50% of the days of the week.