Chris Reimagined

Okay, this post gets way more personal reflection-y than I wanted, but there’s a point to it I swear.  What I want to focus on is three themes:

1. Time
2. Honesty
3. Forgiveness

Like I said in my introductory post, the thing that got all this kickstarted was the health problems, but even before that I was finding myself increasingly dissatisfied with some parts of myself.  Just little things here and there that I know I could be doing better.  Perhaps after a while, my dissatisfaction with those things might have led me to make some of the changes I am talking about here, but my guess is not.

See I’m pretty good at kidding myself or settling or doing the small amount to partially fix a problem and not really solving the root cause.  You know, that whole thing about treating the symptoms and not the disease.

I say that not to beat myself up, but rather to say this whole reimagining thing didn’t just happen.  I didn’t decide that I wanted to change my ways and then launch the website, first I had to figure out what I wanted to change.  Even though I had been feeling sort of psychically “off” for a while, I still needed a period of reflection and criticial analysis of myself then and myself how I want to be.

It was a tough process which ranged from stepping back at times when I was angry and asking myself “Why am I losing my composure?  Why is something so small making me so mad?” to thinking on several occassions “I liked myself better in high school.  Is that because I was naive or was I truly a better person?”

Basically, overtime, I had to be honest with myself.  Unflinchingly honest.  I had to look at myself in the mirror and not look away.  Not gloss over the imperfections and the things I didn’t like.  (In case you’re wondering, that was both literally and figuratively part of the process.  One of the ways of dealing with being overweight for me was never looking below my neck in the mirror.  Makes it easier to pretend you’re not as heavy.)

At the end though, I had to be honest.  I had to know the things that were bothering me about me and I had to know how much they bothered me so I knew in what order to tackle them.  By now, you can probably tell the thing that was bothering me most was my weight.  It’s why I am tackling it first.  Even if nothing else falls in line, I will at least feel better about myself because of it.

Lastly, after I had picked myself apart, clear down to the bone, I had to do one more thing or else I wouldn’t be able to do this.  I had to forgive myself or at least accept myself.  I had to remind myself that yes, I have issues, but I’m not a horrible person.  I’m not even a bad person I don’t think, just a person who would do well to change his ways.

And I can accept that.  I can accept that I would prefer to be skinny, but my wife and child still love me even though I’m fat.  I’m not going to hell because I dress shabby.  I still have a good career even if my hair is a bit shagified.

I thnk that, ultimately saved me.  I am pretty sure psychologically I would reject this whole thing if I had to wake up every morning and recite every reason I had F—ed up my life.  I’d fall off the horse and go about my merry way, never the better.  Instead, I have resolved to say that I got here through a series of actions or inactions I would prefer I hadn’t made, but I did and I can live with it.

And that honestly, is something I can live with.  It’s how I can have a huge list of things about myself that I want to change and not delve into piles of self abuse.  I don’t know about you, but accepting my nature as one who has made mistakes and working past them feels a lot better telling myself what a loser I am.  I think if you try it, you would find it works better, too.  Just guessing!

With that said, I think a quick recap’s in order.  So I could start my reimagining, I first had to figure out what I wanted to change.  Even though I had some ideas, I still spent a goodly amount of time figuring out exactly what I want to change.  During that time, I had to be completely no-holds-barred honest.  Any fault, any problem, any issue had to be noted and I had to keep my eyes open.  Once I had that list though, I then had to sit back and say that, at the end of the day, I wasn’t a bad person because of all the stuff I wanted to change.  Merely a person in a state of flux.  And that was okay.