Root Cause

It amazes me that inner complexities can boil down to absolute simplicity - that all the levels and layers and intricately woven webs that make up a person, their motivations, their thoughts attitudes and perspectives grow out of one root. The more people I come across in life and the more of myself I get to know and examine the more I realize that there are these tiny little defining moments which all of these complexities grow out of. So many of these moments are so small that they seem at first to escape recollection - just pieces of something not even worth mentioning - but they shape so much of how we interact with the world around us.

I never cared much for people's praise - at times I actually dislike it, especially when it's at the cost of another's self-esteem. I know exactly where this comes from. When I was ten years old my brother and sister and I went to visit my grandfather and his wife in Florida. The entire trip was full of these little moments in which it was clear that my grandfather was placing me above my siblings. It enraged me - for all our difference they are my siblings and we were all children and deserved equal outpourings of love. It's not that I don't want to be told I am good or pretty or smart - it's that I don't want to be held publicly as a measure of those things - no one is less because I am whatever it is that I am. It always seemed unjust and still in those moments I'm a ten year old girl with no recourse against the injustice.

On the other side of that I find my vanity - the only place from which I am ever truly offended. And I also know well the root of that uprising. I was twelve and I had started a new school and my mother came to pick me up late in the afternoon. I was on the field and we were all playing soccer, she called my name and everyone turned to look at her and then they looked back at me slightly confused wondering who this olive complected woman as round as she was tall could possible be. We were a stark contrast that I noticed for the first time as I walked toward her. I was slim and pale, my blonde hair falling straight down my back and she was heavy and dark with short curls framing her face. Her pants were tan and creased in the front under her tummy from sitting and I thought they made her look lazy and disheveled. I was twelve and embarrassed by her lack of care and I promised myself quite sternly that I would never let myself look like that. It pains me now to think back on that memory how callused and selfish I was - completely blind to the reality of beauty and life. But that promise took hold of me nonetheless and I chased healthy eating and fitness, beauty products and fashion - always trying to outrun the image of my mother on that day. So although I generally dislike an abundance of praise from the moments with my grandfather, I also want my vanity to be appeased from that moment with my mother - creating a seemingly disparate complexity of extremes both seeking to be simultaneously satisfied - at first glance looking inconsistent and contradictory at best.

In reality both of these boil down to the same place - a desire for congruency. I wanted to be congruent with my siblings - to share an identifiable likeness that meant we belonged together and deserved equality in treatment. I wanted my mother to be congruent with me so that I felt like we belonged together - that there was some noticeable purpose to our ties that couldn't be denied by human eyes. These moments lead to unconscious patterned behaviors that never actually satisfy the desire they are aimed at, and thus continue on it perpetuity. And where does this need for congruency stem? From a need for identity - a frame of reference from which to build my understanding of who I am and what that means. To find congruency within my family meant that my identity was linked to them creating a sense of security in its ability to persist and purposefulness to my being. Now looking at all of this scribbled out across this page, the silly degradation of these needs and desires into behaviors creating the opposite effect seems nonsensical - but then again the evolution of the self is a peculiar thing.