...pieces

In spite of it being fall and everything in nature going into its hibernation stage, the concept of wholeness is something that seems to be sprouting up quite a bit lately. The most recent presentation came from a lecture by Jane Fonda I attended last week. The Women and Gender Studies Program brought her to campus as part of the Women of the World lecture series. It wasn’t a fantastic speech or anything, but she made some insightful and thought-provoking comments and not just about gender.

Her main focus was that, as a society, we start socializing our children very young into “appropriate” gender roles. Girls play house, secretary, and tea party while boys play with cars, erector sets, and sports equipment. These observations by themselves aren’t terribly eye opening, but the next part was; to fit these roles we ignore parts of ourselves. We take what society tells us to be and how to behave and we turn that into a piece of our puzzle and force it into our personality. She used a word, vibracated, that I can’t seem to find in any dictionary that she used to mean “the separation of head and heart”. She used this in reference to the socialization of young boys; don’t cry, be strong, don’t show emotion, etc. That made me wonder if this separation of heart and mind might be beneficial. I don’t know that it is, but I still wonder. She also relates the stories of her youth; privilege, celebrity status, and expectations, and how it took her being 61 and single before she started to feel whole.

My contribution to this is merely an extension of this idea. As a child we start out whole, we are comfortable with who we are. You can see this in action every time a parent blushes from an innocuous child’s question or in the grocery store, near the candy. Eventually this wholeness, this sense of self-security is replaced with doubt. As we are socialized we realize that other people have a set of expectations for us, and every time we are corrected we worry about what else we might be doing wrong. We begin to take pieces of ourselves and leaving them behind. Like a puzzle, we want to be the image on the box, we want people to be able to look at us and know what they’re getting. Our adult life is spent trying to recover the pieces that had been cast off as an adolescent. We want so much to be whole that we try any of the pieces available to us; work, hobbies, things. Some people are fortunate enough to finish the puzzle, the rest of us are stuck looking for…