March 25th, 2009

I grabbed an old backpack out of the closet this morning. At the bottom of it were some pages from a 20-year-old journal I kept. There was even a to-the-day 20-year-old entry for March 25th, 1989, which I duly read, with some horror.

And it got me thinking of a particularly smart woman I knew in the early 1990s.

(She looked like an elf. A magic elf. )

She talked about "tapes" in our minds. Her idea was that these "tapes" are written into our consciousness by the words we say about ourselves or the words we hear about ourselves. Like mantras with linguistic meaning, they form a part of our minds. We become our words. We adopt our own affectations.

For that reason, she concluded, positive thinking really is something advantageous, even desirable. Further to that, she maintained that by repeating positive words over and over, we slowly but surely overwrite the old tapes with new tapes. At the time that thought make me scowl and snort derisively. But why? The clue is something I wrote to myself back in 1989 (journal entries should be like copyrighted material: after a certain time they should become public domain).

March 25th, 1989

I am locked in mortal combat with myself! Two urges competing for control of my whole fucking life. One: self esteem, success, confidence, strong projection of a capable intelligent guy. The other: shitty feelings, fear of being stupid, ugly, fallible, mutable. The old feelings always settle in again. Why?

Honestly, I don't know where all that came from, but I was barely out of my teens, so a lot of it probably came from peers, parents, my own lack of understanding of others. Some of it from television more than likely. That is the tape that got written into my mind—that, in fact, became a part of my mind.

It's a bit painful to read it still, because it's not exactly the opposite of how I feel now. I mean, I am a lot more sure and solid now, of course. And I don't walk around constantly analyzing others to see how they feel about me. But for 20 years of living and growing, I'm not all that different. Makes me wonder if that duality that I talked about twenty years ago does not point out some sort of universal internal struggle.

Maybe this: If you are not psychopathic: After all the necessities of life such as food, shelter, safety, etc. are established, then one launches into that rich internal duality of self-assuredness vs. self-consciousness.

In that case, everyone who isn't a psychopath (yes, they really are excluded from this conversation) must spend a good chunk of their adult lives writing new tapes to overwrite those tapes of inadequacy. I know that's what I've been doing the last 20 years. I sure hope I don't have to keep it up for another 20!

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