In the closing paragraph of Robert Ludum’s The Bourne Supremacy there is a line that hit me.
“What do you do when there’s a part of you that you hate?”
And this got me thinking. Is there any real part of myself that I hate? Sure there are parts of myself that I dislike and things that I would rather weren’t there, but is there really any part of me that I hate? **But please note here that I’m not taking about just hating a specific feature such as having big ears or maybe disliking my teeth, I’m taking about more fundamental personality issues.
The source of this quote, for those who have never read The Bourne books (don’t even mention the movies, they are mutually exclusive), is the protagonist, a man with two personalities. One, the mild mannered David Webb, an academic oriental scholar who lost his family while living in Saigon. The other Jason Bourne, the man he turned into when he lost his family. A psychotic killer of epic proportions, with a keen mind for the underworld and an immense knowledge of the deadly arts. Though always with a strong sense of morality that underlies all his actions.
I realise that I can hardly compare to this kind of schizophrenia and intense kind personality abnormality, but it still sparked some thoughts in my mind. What do I really dislike about myself and more importantly, what do I do to remedy those dislikes? The next part of the paragraph comes from Marie, David’s wife, responding to his query.
“Accept it”, answered Marie, “We all have a dark side, David we wish we could deny it but we can’t, it’s there perhaps we cant exist without it.”.
This response kind of got to me. In essence I think she is making two points. The latter of which is that there are things in ourselves that make us who we are. Things we cannot deny even if we try. Some of these are good and some of these are bad, but in the end they make us who we are. In this respect I feel that she is right on the mark. Everyone has things they don’t like about themselves but they make them who they are, faults and all.
However her first point got to me. It jarred me out of the story only a paragraph from the end. It just didn’t sit right and didn’t seem to follow the flow of the book. Up until this point every time David’s mental state was brought up, it was always said that he needed to resolve his problem or if he was putting it off, it was with the intention of going back and addressing it at a later stage. Not just putting it in the closet and locking it away.
However, incongruities in the book is not the point of this blog post. I suppose the main point is self image & self worth, and dealing with them. These are two things that if I’m to be honest about I’ve struggled with.
First lets start off with self image. By self image I don’t just mean the typical body image, you know the way people feel about how they look, skinny, fat, overweight, underweight e.t.c. That is included in self image, I mean the view people hold of themselves. Are they strong willed or weak. Are they confidant, ambitious e.t.c. Up until I was about 16 or 17 I had a horrible self image. I didn’t see myself as good at anything or having any particular good points about myself. My body image was much the same. I was very definitely placed in the overweight category, and while I was still sporty I always had a spare tyre around my waist. Slowly over the course of a year or two that has changed. I began to see the good points about myself, and all the things I could do better than others. And I began to get confidant and more self assured. And then only this summer I started to loose significant amounts of weight up to the point where I would consider myself of average weight for my age. Obviously this was a massive change in me and one I think almost everyone goes though.
Over the course of the past two years I’ve realised something, and it has caused a fundamental shift in the way I live my life. There may be things wrong with me. Things I don’t like and things I want rid of. But there is no use in just sitting on your ass and crying about it, you have to get up off your ass and do something about it. Previously if something was wrong I would get upset about it but I’d do nothing. Even in many instances the opposite of what I should have been doing. Lets take for example my weight. I was never really happy with it, but instead of getting off my ass and changing my diet I would eat a pizza, or a pack of Tesco Custard doughnuts or maybe a packet of biscuits. These days I get up off my ass and do something.
And this is what pissed me off about Marie’s comment in the closing paragraph of The Bourne Supremacy. You don’t just accept it. You try your hardest to overcome it. You work at it so at least if you fail you can say you tried, and you may have even taken a chunk off of the problem.
Why would someone just accept something they hate about themselves? I can understand hesitancy in addressing a problem you don’t like, and I can even understand a paralyzing fear which might stop you from even starting. But to just accept something forevermore as a part of you that you hate just gets on my tits.
To answer the initial question I posed at the beginning of this piece “Is there any real part of myself that I hate?”. I’ve thought long and hard about it and I think I can confidently say no, there is nothing about myself that I hate. Which from my experience of the world and of other people seems to be quite fortunate and unique. There are of course things that I intensely dislike, both on the personality and appearance fronts but nothing that I hate.
And from that I can draw strength and satisfaction.