“You need to start being a friend to yourself.”
“…What does that mean?”
I see a psychologist every Wednesday for 45 minutes. I have been seeing her for a month now. I finish up my physical science class at 12:20. Catch the 6 bus downtown. I arrive at her office a little before 1 PM and I press the little button that tells her I am there. She comes and gets me. I sit on a comfortable, oversized couch, move the Kleenex tissues closer to myself, and tell her things that are on my mind. She asks me questions, follows up with things I said before, watches me cry, and gives me a task at the end of each session.
This past Wednesday, one of the things she told me was that I had to start being a friend to myself.
I do not know what being a friend to myself means.
I do not know how that manifests. At all.
I came to the States in 2008. I was 11 years old. I started middle school here, in Fairfax, Virginia. My brother was born two years later. I am 19 now. I am in college. I haven’t been a friend to myself in 8 years.
Perhaps, things would have turned out differently if I hadn’t come here and if I had continued living in Turkey and I was still an only child, or maybe if I had a twin sister, etc. There are a countless number of what-if’s in my head. But what matters is what I am living now, and I am living this.
I never had to be a friend to myself before I was 12. At least, I don’t think I did. I was myself, I was happy, I felt loved, I felt worthy, I felt strong. I made people laugh. I led people. I was sure of myself. As sure as I could be, when I was 11 and 10 and 9 and 8 and 7, and 6 even.
It all changed obviously. I came to a different country with a different culture and a different language. Had no friends, and not even a sibling. Whatever. Life was hard. I was resilient. I survived. That’s what matters. Right? That’s what I am supposed to say? I finished middle school, I learned English, I got into one of the hardest high schools in the country, and now I attend an elite institution for higher education. I am almost done with the checklist, no? I will graduate, get a job, an MS, a PhD, a few awards, a few publications, a family somewhere in there, a nice house, and a car, and then, before I know I’ll be retiring, and I’ll have money to retire safely, and it’ll all be okay. It’ll be over.
To say that I am hard on myself is an understatement. The relationship I have with my ‘self’ is rather complicated. I don’t hate it. I don’t love it either. I have a fundamental problem with its existence – in how it exists and how it continues to exist – but I don’t know what to do about it.
That doesn’t make sense.
I respect it the same way you would respect someone’s right to freedom of speech. On principle. That’s a good way to put it. Anything I do that gives the impression that I am confident, self-loving, or with a strong sense of self – is calculated and on principle. Let’s think about it like that.
When someone is rude to me, I know to be offended. I know how I should react. Ideally. So I do. It’s like this: my sense of self is like the Big Bang theory in science. Everything depends on it being true, but in the end, it is but a theory. If it were to crumble, it would bring down entire fields with it. It would shake the foundations of scientific method. It would collapse reason on itself. Etc.
So we just operate on the axiom that it’s true. It’s the best we got, and we don’t want to dig too deep into it. That’s my sense of self. I know I have to balance an entire universe on it, so I don’t dig too deep into it. I let it exist in theory and be supported by observation. What works for the majority and what doesn’t. And go on my merry way.
(That is – I don’t.)
The whole reason I am seeing a psychologist is because I am tired of living as a theory. I am tired of trying to uphold this tower that’s my life, when it’s been built on sand that’s slowly giving way.
And so my first task should be to prove that my self exists, so that I can build on it. And my second should be to befriend that self. And to befriend anyone, you have to get to know them.
So… all of this long-winded, choppy, and unpredictable block of writing is to tell you (and me) that I am trying to make changes in my life so that I can develop an authentic sense of self, first – and then become a friend to that self.
Practically, this looks like further elimination of useless media I consume. Thus the deletion of my Twitter and Pinterest accounts, as well as various Tumblr blogs. The bittersweet goodbye to my Snapchat friends (& streaks). The restart of my IG feed. Rearrangement of my daily routine to enable more reading and writing, and less dependence on my phone and electronic devices.
My reason for these changes is that I have felt uninspired and resentful of my art, in any medium, in the past two years. Just today, going through some old photos I had taken, and poetry I had written – I felt an extreme sense of anger and disappointment. I have made art in the past that made me proud. I don’t claim them to be objectively good art, but rather art with a unique voice and vision. I seem to have lost something.
My camera, Barnabas, is a sad example of how things have changed. There was a point in my life when I put everything on the line to get that camera. A point where I carried it everywhere with me. A point where I would take interesting objects and go on spontaneous photoshoots. I named it, for God’s sake. I named my camera. There was a point in my life where I did that for all the things I loved. For all the things near and dear to my heart. And now? People have to tell me to bring my camera. And each time it happens, preemptive dread fills me. I imagine the weight of it around my neck, all the blurry shots I’ll have to delete, what people will think of the photos that end up being usable. Even the little technicalities overwhelm me. I’ll have to make sure to charge it, and bring the right memory card, and transport all the photos etc. etc.
I haven’t written a poem in almost a year. What happened? It’s not as if I stopped feeling things. What did I lose?
I had fun projects, and interesting ideas, and things I enjoyed doing for myself.
Am I in a constant state of performance? Perhaps. Am I trying to live through other people? Person X does photography, and Y does art, and Z is a good writer. And they are all better at it than I am. I’ll kill my own passion, cloak what I am doing as collecting inspiration, and then be miserable but not show anybody. A perfect plan.
In any case. I hope this will help with the calibration process. God willing.