Someone I know was a pretty hard-core athlete in high school; she did several sports and was fairly "ripped." One day, her coach looked her over for a moment, and then he said (paraphrase) "What guy would want to go out with a girl who had more muscles than him?" She's mentioned this often enough in certain contexts that it is clear that it really colors a god portion of her self-image.
Once upon a time, someone very close to me - someone who knows me as well as anyone knows me - remarked that I can be very hard to read sometimes; it is difficult to figure out what's going on inside me. That, too, was a fairly offhand remark; we didn't discuss it much. But it's stayed with me a long time; it's really motivated me to try to be more talkative about myself with certain individuals.
There are (at least) two ways of looking at what happened in these two cases. On one of them, her coach's remark didn't cause the development of body-image problems; rather, it just came (in retrospect) to be a phrase that exemplified them. On the other view, a different statement might have tipped her (or me) in a very different direction. It's like dropping seeds in a field: while it certainly matters what the soil is like, the field has many possible futures. Only when the seeds are added (the right seeds) does one of those possibilities become actual.
I mention this because I am interested in the way that single moments, single phrases, can stay with us, can color our whole lives. Maybe we don't understand these fragments when we hear them, but they stay with us, in our minds (consciously or otherwise), we begin to find the meaning in them, to make them something to us - to figure out what whole the fragment belongs to.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment