It’s amazing to me how much bitching is required in order to process crap situations or encounters. Conversation after conversation retelling the same slight, emphasizing your side in the way only you can, which is to say: without any understanding of the other persons (possibly totally legitimate) perspective. In my head, I am like, so evolved–a skillful communicator, problem-solver, capable of being unemotional, objective and compassionate all at once. But, really, I’m mostly just wading in a pool of toxic emotions–a place where envy and self-doubt reign supreme–where judgments, misunderstandings, inconsistencies and pure acrimony live amongst dread and apathy. This is an image of myself that just doesn’t fit with the one I have in my head. It’s discouraging to upset the portrait of this joyful, optimistic, driven and contented person. The thing that is even more difficult to grasp is the fact that in reality, I am both. Perhaps not all at once. But, certainly I am one thing in one moment and another under contrasting circumstances.

Upon playfully teasing my hubby about his snoring it came out that the reason he gets so defensive when I report the behavior is because being “someone who snores” just doesn’t fit with his own self-image. I laughed at first but then it made complete sense to me. There are all of these things–the way we look, the way we respond to situations, where we work, what we wear, how we speak–that define the version of ourselves we have in our heads. When someone on the outside challenges one of those things–however small the detail may seem to them–it completely breaks down that self-image. “But, I’m quirky, eccentric, unpredictable! It’s a good thing, right? Right?” I found myself saying during an argument where my husband scolded me for something or other I had said–something that seemed lighthearted and funny and joke-y and me. There are things about myself that I believe. I believe them wholeheartedly and any attempt to undermine the me-ness of me is an attack on who I am at my core. In my head these things are unchangeable and factual and permanent. But, they’re not. We grow, we change–slowly sometimes, more quickly other times–sometimes without even realizing it. Our “higher selves” exist as an idea, a goal–as someone who would have, should have, could have said something more intelligent, less reactionary, more eloquent.

I’d really like to meet this idealized version of me. The version of me who always knows the right thing to say, who always looks put-together, who is kind but strong, intelligent and funny, self-assured and self-aware. This is the version I could use right now. Because if life is a mountain–with highs and lows and everything in between–then I am in the river basin looking up, paddling against the current in a starless sky. And, she’d sure as shit know what to do.