On the weekend I was talking to a friend of mine and she was citing some of the lovely old clichés about life and how important it was to be authentic. She has the greatest collection of self-help books and a variety of counselors or therapists or healers or combination of all on her rolodex. For seven and a half years she has been in the process of becoming…becoming might cover the procedure she has been going through but it was more than that.
She was becoming more authentic. I know that is her goal because I have known her a long time. A very long time. But there is a fundamental lack of authenticity in her approach. I’ve spend a few days trying to understand but I still am baffled. She knows the words. She can hum the melody. She can cite the experts. Nevertheless, there she is, after seven and a half years not one inch removed from the starting point.
I gave up believing she wanted to change – at least change the thing she said she wanted to change. I cannot explain why this is the case but I’m getting closer all the time. There is something at her own core she fails to grasp. I think that the change she really seeks is not the vocalized change. It is something deeper.
I was reminded of a friend with a severe obesity problem. Her whole focus of each day was food – eating it, having it, thinking about it – and she had finally broke 300, going the wrong way. I’m a chunky monkey myself but I don’t lose a lot of sleep over it. She was completely obsessed with it to the point that the mail often delivered several infomercial products for weight loss in the same month – sometimes within the same week and one within one day.
We had gone to a movie and she admired the heroine and after the movie, as we headed to the pizzeria, she said she would give up the rest of her life if she could look like the heroine for one day. We were sliding into the seats in the pizzeria as she said it. Oh she exclaimed as she looked at the special – a large pizza with artichokes. That’s what I am going to have. And she did. Along with a death by chocolate dessert. As she licked her fingers, she waxed eloquent about how much she would love to look like that actress.
There is a similarity between these two women. And I think they are more typical than I realize. The gap between their reality and their desire is so great that they view narrowing that gap as such an impossibility that they just keep on fooling themselves and count on us, their friends, to play the game.
It’s up to us, as friends, to consider our role. Too many people like this in our lives can cause angst for us. If we did tell them what we really think, would they believe us? Would they still love us? Would we be putting ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to narrow our own gap or at least look at our own lives more intensely?
Try it – look at your friends and the gaps between their obsessions and their reality. Look at yourself in the same harsh light. Believe me, it can be a real shock to see ourselves as others see us. But it’s a necessary step in achieving our dreams.
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