therealkatiewest:

To me, the self is all important. Self discovery is a path I would hate not to walk. Examining why I do things and why I feel the way I do about situations I find myself in often consumes me. I am concerned with bettering myself, with expanding my own ideas, with pushing myself to my limits. Exploring the idea of self and how people feel about it, and how this in turn affects their lives, interests me greatly. So when I was faced with Christina who was able to put her self aside, I was amazed. I’ve tried to do this and have failed. I cannot put myself second…

… I don’t think I’m wrong to feel this way. I don’t think it can be wrong. It’s just different. Because I’ve been told my whole life that being selfish detracts from other people’s happiness - but I know this is a lie. I make people happy. I go out of my way to make people happy. If the reason I do this is to make myself happy, so what?

What you are is self-focused. There is nothing wrong with that, it is the reason you are so skilled at self-portraits. Some people see others with the clarity with which you see yourself. It is like having a different lens on a camera. “Selfish” is when you better yourself at the expense of others, when you value your comfort over theirs and you indulge your own convenience even in the face of hurt or struggle for others. I don’t think you do these things. 

I can understand that it feels crippling to experience your attempts at being “outwardly focused” as unsuccessful. I compare this to people who cannot bear to look in the proverbial mirror, who crumble at attempts to examine, improve, and especially help themselves. Again, it is just a matter of being differently oriented. One strength is not more valuable than another, one weakness is not more vile and incapacitating. There are people who have found some sort of way to balance their strengths and buttress their weaknesses and I think that’s the result of an extremely customized regimen. No garden variety personal trainer can coach someone into that kind of balance, and it is even questionable if such balance is worth the discipline and effort it takes not just to bring it about but to maintain it through all the years and challenges of one’s life.

Personally I do think that the struggle is worth it, the quest for balance in one’s focus. But as I was discussing yesterday with a friend, I tend to be oriented toward feisty grappling and scrappy struggling. I dive in, I wrestle, I push back, I stir up, I adventure, I recoil, I attack, I abandon. It’s a useful tendency for fighting one’s way through professional ballet schools and careers, and it’s also what I think makes my dancing any good at all (it certainly isn’t this compromised body with its comparatively limited range of motion and ordinary beauties!) so I tend to be very defensive of it (especially since I have so often heard it called unfeminine, foolish, and pathetic by people who wished me nothing good). But more and more as I interact with others I have come to understand it not as “the right way to be” but just “the way I am,” and that there is much validity in other, softer approaches to life. I don’t expect my fundamental nature to change and that’s a good thing because what’s best about me comes from that. But I do believe in self-improvement, I do believe that I can look to those softer, less aggressive models and see something luminous in them that, if I took it in and let it rest within me, would encourage me to a level of good in my life that my wild ways alone could not reach.

Which is to say, I don’t think there is inherent value in struggle. Observing that things are lovely as they are, taking the majority of one’s strength from the loveliness of the status quo is an equally powerful and righteous philosophy for life. All the struggle in one’s body is not going to lead to perfection, after all.

Ideally I think a mixture of both approaches is best but sometimes, with this question, I find myself wondering if the old adage “You can’t sit on two chairs” is applicable. Meaning, we can strive for balance because balance can be helpful, but in the end we are what we are — feisty or peaceful, self-focused or outwardly-gazing, portrait or landscape — and it’s better to put energy into being good at what you are than being lousy at what you aren’t.

I think we can be forgiven for the fact that what we are isn’t ever entirely well-rounded. I know I forgive it in others and that might be the closest I ever come to forgiving it in myself.