This and this and this

I have a very bad habit of saying 'this or that'. I have that habit with humans, particularly myself. It is a habit that makes it difficult for me to accept everything about me all at the same time. It is the habit at the heart of my categorising things and people until I feel I have made sufficient sense of life.

So I am either good or bad. I am reliable or unreliable. I am on a diet or off a diet. 

The irony is that I know intellectually that binaries suck. Life is not binary. Humans cannot be reduced to being this or that. And yet I still use binaries as a stick to beat myself. When I make a mistake, I'm not competent and incompetent, I must switch my mental image of myself to being fundamentally incompetent. It is exhausting, damaging and unnecessary.

Enter Deleuze. Life is a series of 'and'. I am this and this and this and this. As my beloved Buzz Lightyear might say, I can continue those ands 'to infinity and beyond'. 

How different might my life and self-identity - and my ability to complete a doctoral thesis (!) - be if I allowed myself to be competent and incompetent and clever and inadequate and resistant to being self-categorised into binary boxes and making use of binary boxes in everyday life and ...

Even thinking about is is freeing. And scary. It feels as if the space I inhabit in this social world is increasing with each and that I add. As a woman who was been taught from early childhood not to take up too much space - psychologically, audibly, physically, relationally - that is powerfully liberating. 

If I do not try to constrict myself and make myself small by squeezing me into boxes, I fear I will become like the giant Alice of Lewis Carroll's creation, and trample and break all that is in my path. I also smile inwardly at the thought of seeing what shape and size I become when I allow myself to be and and and and and. 

And I remember the words of Marianne Williamson...

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

And I wonder what the next few years will hold.