January 23, 2004

• Changing our Minds

  
  

  That phrase, to change one’s mind, in common usage usually denotes remaking a decision already made, taking a different stance on an issue, turning back from one’s former course.   I guess I’ve changed my mind on the issue of changing my mind several times in my life.

  
  

  I recall that as a child I was frequently criticized for changing my mind.  I was quick and impulsive in my decision-making, and equally quick to reject what I had chosen and choose again.  I have come at this ripe age to see it as my innate perfectionism at work, the “grass is always greener” syndrome, finding the flaws in each choice I made and tossing it aside for the next promising option.  As a result of the criticism I received, as I matured I made an effort to be consistent, to stick with what I had chosen.  That sometimes worked to my detriment.  Sometimes, it even got me criticized as stubborn or fixated.   

  
  

  In the culture in which I grew up the common myth was that women tend to change their minds more than men and, according to men, “too much”.  When we women started getting together in the ‘sixties to liberate ourselves, we shared our mutual observations that men tended to get themselves stuck in unproductive pursuits and futile or destructive courses of action because their egos would not permit them to admit that they had been in error all along.  To change one’s mind one must be able and willing to admit that one has made a mistake, taken a wrong turn, believed in something that was not true, etc.  The females’ cultural status as inferiors gave us the advantage of less ego to contend with, making it easier to admit our errors, learn from them, grow and change.

  
  

  I have found that for me it is often preferable to change my mind, accept new ideas, take a new direction, admit that I screwed up or went down a dead-end road, than it is to go on down that road to the bitter end.  Just because it may be preferable to change, that doesn’t make it easier.  There’s inertia to consider, and ego too.  Just being a woman doesn’t make me immune from a reflexive hesitation about admitting my mistakes.  Even when I’ve admitted that I need to change the way I’m going, it still requires an effort to make the change.  Changing my mind is a helluva lot simpler than changing my life, but once I have changed my mind, if I do not follow through and change my life, I end up killing a bit of my soul.  This much I have learned from experience.

  
  

  But what I had in mind when I sat down to write this was a different sort of mind-change, a higher octave of it, so to speak.  At some crucial turning points in my life I’ve realized that the thing about my life that I needed to change was my mind itself, my attitudes, my outlook, my consciousness.  Expressing that here now is harder than doing it ever was.  Some of the inadequate phrases that have come to mind include, “picking myself up by my bootstraps,” and “biting my teeth.”  I have done it.  I know I did it because I went through the experience of doing it.  I consciously reinvented myself, but I cannot begin to explain how I did it.  It is hard enough even recalling or relating to the person I was before those changes.  I remember events but have difficulty relating to my own responses to those events because they were not the response I would have to the same event now.

  
  

  All this has attained some importance for me recently because I’m in situations where if I could share with some others some secret of how I reinvented myself, I could help them do the same.  They seem to want it and need it as badly as I ever did.  I want to share it.  Words fail me.  When I can barely remember the person I was before the change, that ne who made that change, how do I say what she did to achieve the change?  The best I can do is just say I willed it.  I transcended myself.  I do say that, and all I get back is blank looks.  I guess you had to be there.  I sorta wish I had been, but that was someone else, not I.

  
  

   

  
  

   

  • 4:44 am
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