Question No. 1: How do you deal with parts of yourself you have left behind?
Q: How do you deal with parts of yourself you have left behind? That you have purposefully weakened or excised so that you can function better in society/the world? e.g., naivete
—Hilary, age 35
Perspective #1: Jean
Dear Hilary,
I think the parts are still there, just ghosts of themselves, wandering the hallways of the mind, effecting nothing, except on your most vulnerable occasions, whispering, what if? In dreams, planting doubt, smoke and mirror visions, ephemera that evaporate upon waking, but that leave an unsettled sort of feeling.
I’ll give you one example. I am a minimalist. I discard items with relish. I look forward to retrieving the mail so that I can discard the envelopes the letters come in, and sometimes even wholesale without opening because they are clearly junk. Unless Christmas cards feature some truly beloved combination of people or babies or dogs in my life, I enjoy dumping them before the New Year, along with old New Yorkers I never lament not reading, into the recycling bin. I love shedding weight in the form of things.
As a child, I was the opposite. I once held onto the tiny nubbin of an eraser because I was too sad for its life to end. I would argue with my parents each time we moved to yet another suburban tract of Orange County about what to keep and what to donate. I wanted to keep it all -- all the stuffed animals, all the books, the pens and old school projects. By contrast, my parents and live-in grandmother held no such sentimentality for old things. On several visits home from college, and long after, I would find a bag or box of my things missing, only to be told it had been given away.
I had no choice then but to let go, to let go of the past I would no longer be able to remember by their representative objects. Subsequently, my memory worsened with time, and I got very good at letting go.
But occasionally, like when I moved recently, I’ll hold onto something, like a guitar clip I used not very well for a year and will never use again. The year I used it was an emotionally charged year, deeply painful, joyful and transformative. My emotional memory is short, which makes me a resilient person, but also a forgetful one. So I’m relearning the importance of keeping mementos, little things to be the keepers of my memories, that can be reopened safely in my dreams.
Yours truly,
Jean
Denny, Sunnie, or Jean — Denny and Sunnie are retired Korean American boomers who are also ex- husband and wife. Jean is their daughter.
Perspective #2: Delta
Dear Hilary,
I’ll start by answering your question with other questions: how do you know that you left parts of yourself behind? Are you not whole? Perhaps there are characteristics that you feel are part of you, but that feel unattended to?
What does it mean to function better in society? Is the goal of a human, being a human, to function best in the society of this moment (whatever moment that might be)? Society is just the shape of our world that some people invented years ago. They shaped it then, you are shaping it now. Old habits die hard! Nothing ever shifts or changes if everyone sticks with the outlines as they’ve been drawn, as they seem always to have existed. Think about how much the world has changed in the past 20, 30, 40 years. Depending on your age, you may not have necessarily experienced the world as changing, but it has. What I mean by this is that what the next five or 10 or 20 years are going to look like is anyone’s guess; you can choose to mold yourself to how other people decide those years are going to look, or you can think about opening the doors and windows of yourself and looking in, to see how you want those years to be.
Try digging up or reclaiming those bits of yourself that you buried, and give them a chance; try dusting them off, letting them see the light of the day. It’s possible those parts of you will already look different than they did the last time you saw them, when the moment felt right to bury, to excise, to leave behind.
Warmly,
Delta
Delta is a curious observer and dedicated student of humans and their intriguing ways.
Perspective #3: Rose
Dear Hilary,
I do think there can be parts of ourselves that we leave behind. Or at least we think we have, until the vestiges are revealed when we are around people who knew us when. But the example at the tail end of your question threw me off. Naivete is a phase, a state of being, a natural starting point. It is not a part of you, it is a part of the human condition. We all start this way. As a parent, watching your child demonstrate pure innocence is poignant because you know it is ephemeral. Yet no one wants to hear their grown child ask what they do at Circle Time in astronaut school. We move through and out of naivete. We also move back into it. Every time we enter a new context—a different field of study, a foreign land, a new relationship—we re-enter a state of naivete. It is uncomfortable, but it is how we grow. Maybe if we don’t feel naive anymore, we have become stuck. It may be time to stretch our weary and comfortable muscles and find new literal and metaphorical terrain, saturating in naivete until it eventually ripens into wisdom. And then do it all again.
The only way to fully leave naivete behind is to stop stretching. Don’t stop!
Yours,
Rose
Rose is a gray haired and wise future version of one of the many middle-aged Sarahs in Flyover Country.