There's a wonderful article in the Times today about a doctor who blogs about his life as a medical professional. They reported on his recent take on helping overweight patients - not by lecturing or shaming them, but instead helping them feel more positive about themselves: leading them to understand that they are worth the effort of being healthy and taking care of themselves. No one, he reasons, wants to take care of a body they feel guilty about or are ashamed of.
I think he's right. It's only through the maintenance of a healthy ego that one can be successful at anything they set out to do. For example, I had a bastard of a choir director in college who convinced me that my voice sucked and that Music and I would never be friends, much less buddies on a first-name basis. He was wrong: my voice doesn't suck, but it was years before I was comfortable singing again. Empirically, I realize that I do not have the makings of a Renee Fleming nor will I ever even be a competent music professional. But I enjoyed music and singing, until I ran into him, and sadly, I let his negative influence, shame and judgement take that enjoyment away from me. Authority, as they say, is powerful.
Another example: when I was a graduate student in the Poetry program at Temple University, I had a crackpot professor who thought she was seventeen different kinds of brilliant and clever because she published a couple of books (that no one outside of the walled garden of academe had ever heard of), she didn't own a television and had never even seen an episode of Happy Days. Now, I don't necessarily disagree with the television piece of this equation, but not understanding the post-apocalyptic modernist influence of the Tuscaderos on the fin de siecle works of Fonzarelli - that just ain't cool.
Luckily, by that point, I knew how to spot an insecure loser. All semester, we clashed over the fact that I didn't want to write just like her. I wanted to write like me, and apparently, that didn't really work for her so much. When she told me that I needed to go by my given name, because no one would ever accept Andi as anything more than "a perky little sorority girl name," I knew it was over. Leaving her book-lined, ego-hatchery of an office, I went straight to the authorities and defected into the Fiction program, where I lived happily ever after.
I'm not saying that everyone and anyone with a criticism is necessarily a bad person, or driven by their own insecurity to remark hurtfully on someone else's vulnerability. But I know that there have been many times when I could personally do without the comments, especially when they relate to food/eating habits/diets, etc. Yes, I'm glad that this or that diet worked for your sister or colleague or spouse. Or, it's nice that you paid enough attention to our relationship that you recognize a closet eater when you see one - and that you think it would benefit me greatly if I only eat when someone else is in the room. And it's interesting that you care oh-so-much about what I got from the deli today that you have to ask me about it - how many points are in it, whether or not I should really be eating it, etc.
Within the last three weeks, I've heard all of these comments. And in my head, even as well-meaning as they may be, they don't translate as being love or concern or advice. I hear them as blaming statements, as questioning my self-control, as another authority that tells me that I suck at this being healthy thing, and maybe I should just forget about it entirely.
Just imagine it: you're trying to strengthen your ego, find your soul in all of this struggle, making an attempt to unlisten to all the voices who have told you that you can't do it: telling you you're not competent to achieve this goal or accomplish this task. Then try telling yourself that you can achieve it, accomplish it, deal with it, get to a new place with it. By the time you're through listening to other peoples' voices, you're too tired to hear your own.
But there is one voice I keep trying to listen to: Torah tells us this - wisdom I keep going back to, over and over: it is not up in the heavens that someone else will have to reach up to get it and teach it to you; it is not across the sea that someone else will have to cross the sea to retrieve it and teach it to you - no, it is in your mouth, and in your heart, and you can do it.
Listening to it, reading it, and learning it, is one thing. Believing it: entirely another.
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