This Isn't My Life
Every once in a while, I have the experience of a voice in my head popping up to tell me that what I’m currently doing is wrong and that she can’t believe that I’ve “sunk so far.” What that old voice in my head wants is for my life to be what it used to be, or something close to it. And it isn’t.
It happens sometimes when I’m drinking coffee, sometimes when I’m wearing a sleeveless top, and sometimes when I take a sip of alcohol (usually a Mike’s hard lemonade). But it sometimes happens when I’m doing something mundane like running for the train to get to my new full-time job in finance, or when I’m talking to my kids and I realize that I’m not married to their father anymore. Or when I’m writing an essay like this, and I think—this isn’t the way my life was supposed to turn out.
It isn’t that Old me is mad that I haven’t achieved success like she thought I would. In fact, I think I’ve achieved more success as a writer than I ever dreamed. Not financially, sadly. But I think my books and other writings have affected people in a way I hadn’t thought I could. Old me thought I was someone that was unlikeable and didn’t have much of a circle of friends. Old me thought that I could write fun stories, but didn’t even hope that I would end up having the force to change people’s minds or to help heal them by speaking their truths.
When you grow up in a fundamentalist, perfectionist family with a religion that reinforced those ideas, you develop a kind of super-ego judge who keeps you in line. Because if you don’t develop that, you fall out of the group because it’s so hard to fall in and do ALL THE RULES. I was really, really good at following all the rules of Mormonism. (Not so good at other parts, but I didn’t notice those other parts, so?) I made up new rules of Mormonism to follow (hence the prepper parts of my Mormonism). I felt continual positive feedback from that judgmental super-ego because I was checking off all the items on the list.
Until I realized that the list was only serving me. And it wasn’t actually serving me. One of the things I remember hearing in graduate school was that if your morality only serves to make you pure and perfect and doesn’t help other people, it’s a pretty poor morality. I rejected this idea initially but it kept rattling around in my head. Twenty years later, I saw that it was true, that I had been using Mormon morality to make me feel good about myself, but I was harming others in my constant judgment of what was right and what was wrong, placing myself above them because I was so “disciplined.”
So I changed. I made a rather radical about face and became the person that Old me struggles to accept. I do many things that no longer have checklists, that are about helping other people and not just making myself feel good about my choices. I no longer have a belief in God, either, because the God I once worshiped was really just my own super-ego.
But getting rid of the Old me voice, that judgmental, ass-hole super-ego, is more difficult than you might think. I suspect that I continue to do races in part because that’s an activity that satisfies super-ego’s need for punishment and for visible marks of “working hard.” Dieting is a constant temptation for the same reason. It makes the voice in my head shut up.
Slowly, I think I will make the voice quieter and quieter. Or maybe I’m just changing the list the super-ego uses into things like environmentalism and political correctness. I hope that’s not what I’m doing, but I admit it’s possible.