Not to get the good grade or the accolade, but for your own Self. Moment by moment, day by day, you are figuring things out, healing, learning who you are, and unlearning who everyone else has wanted you to be. Your mind and your journals are always so full. Day after day, you read, think, and write. You simply cannot leave it all to sort out later, only distilling it down once in a while into something “fit to print” and share. —note to self
In Josef Pieper’s Faith Hope Love, he shares a quote from Nicolai Hartmann: “Instead of feeling misunderstood , he [the beloved who has been thus praised] feels rather understood in a basic manner—and at the same time strongly urged to be as the other sees him.”
What does this mean? According to Pieper, loving someone is wanting the best for him, and that love, because it makes the beloved seem better than he really is, makes the beloved strive to live up to the lovingly created image of him. I disagree with this now, because I better understand poisonous pedagogy and what it does to most of us. Early in a relationship, we strive to be better than we are, to live up to expectations because we are afraid of losing the new loved one. We wear masks and hide the worst parts of ourselves. I did it with Dennis; he did it with me, but there were certainly signs that each of us tried to ignore, no matter what our bodies were telling us. Pieper has it completely backward. We do not become better because we are loved; we pretend to be better because it is expected of us.
I long ago told Jessica that I’ve discovered that it’s not about forgiveness or non-forgiveness; it’s about everything falling into place and turning our right. We should not need to be dissecting every aspect of our selves and our lives. We should be WHOLE, but we need to dissect in order to overcome the damage that has been done to us. Societally influenced people in our lives (beginning with our first caregivers) taught us to betray our Selves by not trusting our Selves. We cannot undo that without poking around to define the problem we are trying to solve.