Wellness Calendar: Monday 15 December

The fifteenth revolution

[The self-identity revolution; starting again; the re-birthing of Humpty Dumpty; psychological suicide]

The self-identity revolution has well and truly arrived, so let’s take some of this for ourselves and make it a solid, mutinous number fifteen on the revolution trail. No more do we need to be held back by notions of reserve and restraint, normality and conformity, gender and sexuality. The floodgates have opened and everything is up for grabs. We can now pick and mix our way through the qualities that make us unique, the essential being that separates us from others, the very nature of who we are and what defines us as an individual. Take spirituality – or not, as the case may be. Take this bit but not that. Take this from there, and that from over there. Take away your own interpretation and your own meaning. Shoulds, musts, oughts, cultural hegemony, dogma, legitimacy – all ripe to be investigated and challenged.

How useful might it be to explore what currently defines you as a person and where you might end up if you fully embrace the identity revolution?

My parent(s)/carer(s). My partner(s). My family members. My friends. My relationship with myself. My childhood years. My teenage years. My adult years. My environment. My morality. My spirituality. My traumas. My values & beliefs. My relationships with others. My health/mental health. My education. My society. My country. My attitude. My politics, My thoughts. My feelings. My actions. My senses. My hormones. My urges. My desires. My drive. My temperament. My work/purpose. My meaning. My gender. My belonging. My power. My control. My culture. My needs/un-met needs. My life experiences. My sexuality. My intelligence. My love & loving. My conflicts. My hopes/fears. My decisions.

How useful (or comforting) might it be to know that we can always change our self, our self-identity, the direction of our life, if we do not like its current trajectory.

“Life always offers you a second chance. It’s called tomorrow.”
Dylan Thomas

There’s one thing we’re all capable of doing, no matter how limited our choices may seem: we can always start again. We can stop being who we were and start being someone else, someone we want to be. We can always re-invent ourselves. We can always re-frame ourselves. We can move away from the things that cause us distress: whether it be people, places or values and beliefs. We can untangle knots and liberate ourselves. We can overcome fears. We can strive for freedom. We can let go. We can end one thing and start another. We can create new memories, new friendships, new foundations. We don’t need to put up with what we’ve got now. We do not need to accept something just because it’s in front of us.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
All the King’s horses and all the King’s men,
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

But Humpty could put Humpty together again.
This was all part of the wider plan Humpty had.

You see, Humpty hadn’t been in a good space for a while.
Life had not gone the way Humpty wanted.
Humpty was ready to pack it all in – to end their life once and for all.

But then Humpty discovered something that was to change Humpty’s life forever.
Humpty realised that Humpty was a construct.
Humpty was a product of the toxic environment that they lived in.
Humpty was the sum of the parts of all that had ever happened to them.
And all this accumulated baggage was causing Humpty a lot of unbearable distress and misery.

Yet just as things can be constructed, so they can be deconstructed.
And just as things can be deconstructed, so they can be reconstructed.

So Humpty took a leap of faith.
Humpty fell from the wall of their old life and reached out to a new way of being.
Humpty pressed the reset button and started afresh.
Humpty moved away from the rotten Kingdom to a new town,
with a new set of values and beliefs and a new set of friends.
Humpty reinvented themselves so that they could love and be loved, so that pleasure could take the place of pain, so that forgiveness could take the place of shame.

Today you won’t find Humpty. Humpty is long gone.
The person that once was Humpty is so different as to be someone else altogether.

Instead of killing themselves, they committed themselves to psychological suicide. This allowed their old personality, with all its wounds and scars, to wither away. And from the ashes came a new, healthy persona, rising, phoenix-like, towards the sun, full of hope and fearlessness and humanity.

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