Beautifully considered and beautifully written, yvesoler.
Thank you for sharing yourself so deeply. Your message strikes me with awe, envy, and gratitude.
Beautifully considered and beautifully written, yvesoler.
Thank you for sharing yourself so deeply. Your message strikes me with awe, envy, and gratitude.
Thank you! I have been pushing to be more honest with myself. It is not easy, we veil so many aspects of our inner reality, even to ourselves. As you probably know from Lapiere's famous study, Attitude vs Actions (1934), we often don't recognize how inconsistent our actions are from our beliefs. At some point, I decided to be vocal about these inconsistencies within myself.
Man, is it hard. Just today I got hit with one of those when I read a sentence by a scientist that said, "My son was playing at his father's house", and I had to acknowledge that it sounded strange to me because my unconscious thought was that the scientist speaking was male. Even though I am an engineer and scientist and many of my female friends are scientists, I still fall back on ingrained cultural norms. Ugh.
Now multiply that by a thousand when it comes to all the unspoken norms we have around relationships, sex, and love. Even as I wrote that above, I thought of all the times those beliefs have been challenged when a partner acted exactly how I wanted. Even though it is what I want logically, it doesn't mean that the jealousy or fear monster within does not rear its ugly head from time to time. Add to that all the nuances around love languages, what it takes to feel safe, societal pressure, etc., and I understand why sometimes it is easier to fall back into the accepted cultural norms of our current society.