I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
Australian singer-songwriter Nick Cave on aging, from the book Faith, Hope, and Carnage in which he was interviewed by journalist Sean O’Hagan:
We’re often led to believe that getting older is in itself somehow a betrayal of our idealistic younger self, but sometimes I think it might be the other way around. Maybe the younger self finds it difficult to inhabit its true potential because it has no idea what that potential is. It is a kind of unformed thing running scared most of the time, frantically trying to build its sense of self — This is me! Here I am! — in any way that it can. But then time and life come along, and smash that sense of self into a million pieces….
Then comes the reassembled self, the self you have to put back together. You no longer have to devote time to finding out what you are, you are just free to be whatever you want to be, unimpeded by the incessant needs of others. You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person — I don’t know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world.
[emphasis mine]
How do you put yourself back together after your sense of self is smashed to bits by life? That’s what I’m exploring with my conceptual art and writing project, Things Men Gave Me. When I got divorced in 2012 and then less than two years faced the loss of another person important to me, I completely lost my sense of self.
But I didn’t know I had lost it. I still felt like I had it, or that it was easily recoverable… through a romantic partnership. Romance was how I built myself up as a young adult, and, in my mid-forties, I thought romance was the way I could do it again. Ten years, and many relationships later, I realized that I needed to build a new self who didn’t find her worth that way. I found that new self (or more accurately I’m in the process of forming her) through art, writing, and a network of healthy relationships, not just romantic.
The freedom to step beyond expectations and limitations
Cave’s comments on reassembling the self arrived within a conversation about his changing approach to creative work, a shift in consciousness leading to a new way of working and being in the world.
Cave says this shift required letting go of old expectations and limitations:
I don’t really know how to explain this, but, yes, I suspect it is about freedom: the freedom to step beyond the expectations and limitations that are imposed on you—by yourself and others—and just move towards the things that hold meaning. And I think those expectations and limitations have something to do with the past, and the demands that the past makes of you.
How does the past make demands of you? Expectations that you incorporated from people and the culture around you in the past can hold you hostage in the present. Successes you’ve had keep you stuck. Strategies you used to use successfully limit you from meeting the world in a new way.
Some of my limiting beliefs and strategies from the past include:
- Marriage kept me emotionally stable and made me a whole person, acceptable in the world
- My job in technology served as an additional marker of my worth
- The way to develop expertise and be seen as an expert was to go to school and get a degree
- I must keep the most difficult aspects of my personality and my history hidden from the world
Now I am finding freedom in just moving towards the things that hold meaning, to borrow Cave’s phrase.