In Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls, a book you may have overlooked due to the literally navel-gazing cover, there’s a concept I’ve been thinking about this last week.
Brumberg, in her research, read thousands of diaries and magazines and memoirs of teenage Americans from the last two centuries, and, amongst other intriguing discoveries, noticed that although young women have always filled notebooks with resolutions and plans for their future, there has been a significant shift from focusing on spiritual and moral improvement to focusing on fixing perceived physical imperfections: weight, acne, etc. A diary which, in 1880, listed a commitment to speak more kindly to one’s mother might a hundred years later be more likely to contain a pledge to do fifty crunches before bed. Obviously, there are plenty of contributing factors, and also many exceptions, but what struck me as interesting was not the increased importance of the physical self to one’s identity and self-worth, but what the role of moral development might be in our daily lives now.
As adults, religious or non-religious, are we consciously trying to be better? Obviously there’s political engagement, which can range from actually accomplishing something meaningful to just following feminists on Twitter, which may not count, or saying “well, that donation by that person to animal shelters SHOULD have gone to starving children,” while not actually giving anything to starving children, which also does not count, and there’s philanthropy and so on, but I feel that I spend spectacularly little time, versus my mother or hers, in attempting to actually be a better person.
Obviously, I try to be good to others, but that’s so bound up in wanting to be liked that it doesn’t seem possible to speak of it in a vacuum. But I don’t often think “I should be a nicer person this week,” or kinder, or more thoughtful, or more accommodating, or less braggy, although these are all things I could absolutely stand to work on. I do often think about my triceps, and that is a shifting goalpost all its own.
It’s impossible not to see how externally-driven both of these ideas have been, historically. That women have been expected to be both good, and beautiful, and there’s a great deal of freedom possible in extricating oneself from either concept.
But should we, and do we, strive to be good, as we now conceive goodness? How much do you think about it? And how much about your body?
Tags: joan jacobs brumberg, religion, self-improvement, work
Related Posts
On Working at Ren Faires and Letting One’s Freak Flag Fly
Evangelical Sex Stories
The Office Is Not Too Cold; It Is You Who Are Too Weak
Coworker Less Friendly In Person Than Her Gchats Would Have You Believe
Jaya Catches Up: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and To Kill A Mockingbird
This Week in Reading: Francesca Segal and Choire Sicha
I think that the most important thing has always been to tell people you are working on yourself, rather than to actually try to improve yourself. Ex: Going on the Master Cleanse is I think 98% about being able to lord it over other people that you are on a cleanse, 1% about actually losing weight and 1% about that awesome feeling you get when you eat your first bite of [whatever] in days.
This is fascinating to me. As someone with a deeply religious background/family, and as someone who journals like it’s my job, I can look back through my thoughts from late college through yesterday and see a similar shift. As I moved away from that lifestyle, my priorities began to shift from the spiritual to the physical. I still sometimes flash back to that, and really reevaluate where I am emotionally/morally/spiritually, but for the most part, that level of introspection takes a backseat to more “pressing, real-world” concerns, like whether or not I’m eating healthily or getting outside every day.
ETA – not that those are bad things, they are just different than the things I used to focus more of my energy on.
I definitely strive for self-improvement, both physically and behaviorally. Physically, I want to get better at something sporty. I was never very athletic as a kid, I was tall, skinny, gawky, and inhibited — and my parents weren’t athletically inclined either. In fact, they (maybe subconsciously) discouraged my sisters and I from pursuing any sports or showing any competitive behavior. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve found that I love the physical release of sports and the driving feeling of competition even if it’s just me competing against myself. I haven’t chosen one sport yet but I like soccer, yoga, darts, volleyball — I want to DO THEM ALL.
In terms of my behavior, I am constantly working on it. I want to be a better sister to my younger sisters, a more responsible person, more organized, more on top of things, a more compassionate person, less stubborn, more humble. And not in a bad way, but in a strong, self-confident way. More confidence, more outgoing-ness, more genuine friendliness and curiosity.
Also I want to learn more skills. Languages, art, politics, etc!!!
My body, my mind, the world — full of potential. I just need to act on it.
/intensity haha
I was also raised in a deeply religious (Pentecostal!) family but God was never really an element in my journals or goals. I never thought about an omnipotent being judging my actions as a real thing. I never saw God as like a father-being or even a friend, but more of a superstition or a spiritual portal into weird, dark, suffocating, hell-and-demon-ridden realms or vaulting giddy trance-like lightness that was equally unsettling.
Instead it was the interactions with the people around me that made me want to set goals for myself.
I find it appropriate that the ad above this article is for that Dove deodorant that’s supposed to lighten “dark skin” in your underarms. Ugh.
Ugh indeed. BUT I’m getting the ad for Doctors Without Borders, which I find EXTREMELY apropos here.
Folks, if you’re looking for a ways to give back and help out people in dire need, Doctors Without Borders is an awesome and amazing group (they won a Noble Peace Prize) and they will put your contribution to excellent use. So click the link and help people all over the globe and ALSO help the Toast! What could be better?
p.s. I’m not an employee of Doctors Without Borders or anything, but I’ve been a supporter for years and I think they do amazing work. If you want to find out how reliable ANY philanthropic group is, I highly recommend looking them up on a site like Charity Navigator. /offmysoapboxnow
I love them so much!
And donating to them is a key plank of my “I need to be a better person” platform, carefully laid out in numerous journal entries, so ORIGINAL POST CONNECTION.
I think my adolescent diaries were more focused on relational/interpersonal “improvement projects” — what was going on with friends, what was happening with the guy I liked and wanted to date (usually nothing), fights with my parents. In that way, I think my moral worries/struggles pertained more to my interactions with others (I am too bossy/I am a pushover/I am not funny enough/ad infinitum.) To me, that kind of interpersonal pressure wasn’t nearly so toxic as the “you are a beautiful ornament” narratives that bled through life as an adolescent girl, but it comes with its own perils. Defining yourself through others and tying your worth to externalities is tricky business. I think learning to find a comfortable interdependence where a firm sense of self can still coexist is one of the hardest parts of being a girl-child.
I don’t think I ever, ever, ever wrote about God. Maybe being forced to do so intermittently throughout thirteen years of Catholic school suffocated that impulse for me.
Oh this is really interesting, Nicole! First let me get the suck-up out of the way and say that I think you are a very good person already (what with your propensity to send care packages to people you only know from internet) so feel free to think about your triceps as often as you like.
Secondly, I don’t think MUCH about improving my body, but I’m one of those assholes who tends towards skinniness naturally, so my body is more or less approved by society already (and I can find clothes that fit easily). It doesn’t really occur to me to work on things, although I am extremely vain in an anxious sort of way… I got contact lenses when I was sixteen and Lasik in my twenties, and my eyesight was really the only fixable “flaw” I had – I’m not so bothered by anything else as to consider plastic or other surgery.
And what I forgot to say was that in recent years working on myself as a person has become vastly more important particularly as I become more aware of privilege and social justice, but also since becoming a parent as I now have to lead by example – and if I fuck that up I mess up not one but THREE people!
I don’t think you have to call yourself an asshole for having a naturally skinny body…
I agree with you, but I think it just comes back to feeling a guilty about effortlessly (or so it seems) being able to have some physical thing that society values. I actually feel a little bit of this when it comes to hair. I know I’m inclined as a feminist to say “no no! you’re fine the way you are!” and it’s very easy to imagine the response to be “well, it’s easy for you to say that, asshole, you fit X, Y and Z standard…”
Yeah that’s what I meant, sort of. Like, I don’t HAVE to make any effort to be skinny so it’s not something I have to decide whether or not to care about, as someone would if they had a body that was naturally outside society’s currently acceptable range.
I have quite a conscience, and I try to live so it doesn’t keep me awake. I do give to charities, I try to buy ethically.
I’m pretty much at one with who I am though – there are sides of me that I like less so I do try to catch myself behaving badly, but honestly it’s not a preoccupation. LIkewise with my body – I like it, it does what I need it to and I only really work on changing it when I’ve been injured and I’m trying to get my riding fitness back. I don’t like it when my body won’t do what it ought to!
Oh I think about this a lot, especially recently. Hilariously enough, last night I was on a stationary bike thinking about the term self-improvement and the connotations it has, but I was thinking about the non-physical “improvements” in mental and interpersonal arenas. “Self-improvement” as a term puts me on edge for no good reason, but I’m not going to indulge my contrarian streak and *not* try to improve myself just because I don’t like the term.
So I’m debugging myself. (Being a nerd is not a bug, it’s a feature.) I want to be nicer, I want to be more generous toward people. I can default toward a really negative, judgmental internal commentary, but that’s a bug I’m tired of now. I enjoy snarking, but I admire kindness in people.
But should we, and do we, strive to be good, as we now conceive goodness?
Well, maybe. It depends how we conceive of it. Separating how you personally define good from how some amorphous “they” or “we” define it is hard, and maybe takes a lifetime.
I’ve been working on having less snark for some time now and it’s going pretty well. Not perfect but way better than before. And I’m not sure what kind of “snark” you prefer, internal dialogue vs. vocally with others, but cutting back on both does make you feel so much better. It makes the world seem like a less shitty place if you spend time thinking about how lovely people can be rather than meditating on everything thats slightly displeasing.
(But my patience is tried when passing the people who seem to enjoy embodying every outward stereotype of the greek system and all its faults)
It’s both kinds of snark, for sure. The internal is usually angrier than the external, or more frustrated and impatient about the world around me. So I try to catch myself when I start a thought like that, and redirect it — either by recognizing the frustration and defusing it, or by redirecting my attention to something nice. It’s my choice what I focus on, most of the time, so why not actively choose to focus on something (anything!) nice?
It does seem like there are more *ways* to be obsessed with your body now. You can get obsessed with keratin treatments and cleanses and crunches but that stuff wasnt around then. I think if you were fancy in those times, you’d wash your hair with an egg once a month.
Though also it’s interesting that the way women are complimented has also shifted. There used to be such a focus on being virtuous and pious etc etc whereas now women are more likely to be complimented for being hawt.
The times, they are a changing.
I guess I’m an outlier? I got religion at age ten out of a desperate desire to improve myself morally, left the church because it was making me _worse_, and even now I’m basically at peace with my body while completely, utterly loathing my own character and resolving every day to be kinder. MAYBE I AM A TIME TRAVELER!
I’m pretty cool with my body but I think it’s mostly laziness. I currently have more acne than usual and my thoughts on how to deal with this were
a) Maybe I should drink more water, get more sleep, eat more vegetables?
-I’m already trying to do these things, but primarily because I don’t want to die young
b) maybe I should eat less cheese?
-not happening
c) maybe I should get some new face wash?
But then I’d have to go all the way to the store and read the backs of a hundred different bottles and spend money I could be spending on cheese, so, not happening.
b) maybe I should eat less cheese?
-not happening
I APPROVE.
This reminds me of one of the major hypotheses of The Beauty Myth: that beauty today plays the same role in the western female psyche that piety did hundreds of years ago. That is to say, a medieval woman might have feared anything that would cause others to doubt her piety in the same way and for the same reasons that a modern woman might fear anything that could cause others to find her less beautiful. 1880 isn’t exactly medieval, but if that hypothesis is true, I wonder if “goodness” (although that particular term seems a little vague) would have been a comparable ideal for that time.
Yes, I thought of this as well, and agree. I think all people are pushed to improve, but maybe women’s improvement is more obviously “personal” improvement. Men improve businesses, commerce, etc. Women’s improvement spheres are always about themselves or the home because that was the extent of their domain.
I have a naturally guilty conscience, so I spend a substantial amount of time thinking about how I could be a better person. I think that part of why I go to church is because I personally find it a good way to reflect on how I’ve been in the past week and how I could improve without dwelling guiltily forever on everything I regret.
For me, one of the big questions in terms of “goodness” is how to deal with people who are not actually bad people but who have minor flaws that happen to be ones with which I’m particularly impatient. For example, there was this girl in my college group of friend-cquaintances who, while a kind and essentially good person, was the sort of person who spends 95% of a conversation talking about herself. This got on my nerves terribly, so most of the time I tried to avoid talking with her beyond the bare minimum nessecary for politeness. On one hand, I have enough mildly unpleasant conversation in my life as it is, but on the other hand, It really wouldn’t kill me to feign interest in the minute details of someone’s life if it’ll help them deal with the trials of being 18 and away at college for the first time.
Yes, this is me too! I don’t know to what extent this is attributable to growing up in a church in the Calvinist tradition, but seeing humanity–and myself–as wayward and in need of improvement (all the time, always) is definitely part of my psyche. I’m still a church-goer and I find the same benefit in it as you: a time to center and reflect on the week and focus on what I can do differently in the coming week.
And yes yes yes, my sense of my own shortcomings most often kicks in when I’m being impatient and critical of basically good or well-meaning people around me. I still don’t know how to deal with it, but oh man, growing up with the belief that pride was the worst of sins will do that to you every time.
Nothing like a Calvinist upbringing to call into question the motivations behind any virtuous act. Though I’ve managed to avoid being a completely self-righteous twat specifically because I learned the doctrine of total depravity.
That being said, I’m trying to work on being less sharp-tongued and am trying to be gentler with other people. Also, I tend to over-value intelligence and wit, and I am working to find the truth and wisdom in what others who appear simple or dull have to say. So, yeah – being a jerk because of impatience is a struggle with me as well.
Heh. My LiveJournal from ages 14 to 19 is some of the most hideously, obsessively self-loathing-on-the-spiritual-plane, God-knows-my-habits-and-frowns-upon-them, I-cannot-possibly-repent-enough fear-fueled writing ever squirreled away in private posts. Let it never come to life a la Tom Riddle’s diary.
I still use that LJ, less frequently. I would say that after leaving the church, my private posts dropped considerably in number and my public ones turned toward things I was doing at school, complaining about my job, and concerts/friend stuff. As I became more at peace with myself, I had fewer issues to pour into a journal. However I don’t think that means I stagnated; a lot has changed since I was 19 and things continue to change. I continue to change. Maybe I just no longer think that’s necessarily a bad thing.
On the beauty/appearance front, I would say that as a young LDS woman I thought a lot about my appearance, because it didn’t jibe with most Mormon beauty memes. However, I rarely thought about my health. Now I think much less about whether I’m attractive and more about my health and fitness (and playing with makeup for fun because that’s definitely not a thing I ever did in high school). And in terms of being a good person–I think I am becoming a much better person now that I don’t subscribe to certain conservative doctrines.
So. Not to be all cult-y, new-age-y, This-Philosophy-Will-Change-Your-Life-y, buuuuut. . . About seven or eight years ago, I got a job at my now-husband’s summer camp, where they practice a pretty amazingly effective form of counseling / therapy, and it has been super super helpful in my life, when dealing with smallish children (a little bit of abstract reasoning is useful, so too too young can be hard) but also when dealing with grownups and especially when dealing with myself. I won’t go into all the gory details b/c this post will be too long as is, but the orientation of the whole thing is based on Dr. William Glasser’s Choice Theory work (aside: he recently died, the theory used to be called “Control Theory” before that was perceived as too mean, and to be honest, I’ve never finished one of his books because they always seem a little smug and narcissistic and I get annoyed. But the way things get filtered through to camp and then back out to life has really helped me take control of otherwise rampant neuroses and their attendant bad-for-me inclinations.).
ANYWAY, the prong of this philosophy (as interpreted through camp, which is also kind of a utopian personality cult, and I’m O.K. with that, but full disclosure etc. etc.) that helps me so so so much in dealing with my body, my spirit(uality), my treatment of others, etc. is the “How / what kind” orientation of decision-making and general life framing. So, instead of thinking to myself, “I should be nicer / skinnier / stronger / more generous / etc.” as some kind of sought-after end state (as though we ever achieve any such “end” state), I usually end up thinking more contextually about how I want to handle specific situations (e.g., my SIL needs some major hand-holding and I’m exhausted), long-term goals (e.g., my major paper needs to be done in 3 months), or body image / health stuff (e.g., I am feel flabbier now that I am riding the train for 8 hours a week instead of walking 3.5 miles to work and I assume my fitness is suffering from an even more sedentary lifestyle and I want to live a long time and be pretty capable while I do it). I find it very useful to frame it as “I want to be the kind of person who. . .” or “if I were being the person I want to be, I would. . .” Alternatively, when things are not turning out how I’d hoped, either by my own hand or someone else’s, I try (*try*) to think to myself “how do I want to handle this.” As opposed to, you know, “if only you had been/done/said more/better/smarter then [better result.]”
It sounds super-cheesy, but I have found it soooooo useful. Two primary reasons are probably 1) it tends towards pro-action rather than dwelling / brooding / lashing out and the rash and the often ineffective or potentially harmful actions that might otherwise seem like the best options out of only bad choices; 2) it helps me frame things in terms of long term goals, which tend to be more reasonable and appropriate and less eating-disorder / body-dysmorphic / self-flagellating martyr-y, all of which are pretty useless and actually kind of abhorrent to me when I can chill out enough to think about it. Which is not always but at least more often now than it used to be before. . .
It also gives my superego something to do with itself all day, and better to keep that MF occupied, you know?
/end soliloquy/
I think that our focus on physical self-improvement is partly guided by our tendency to conflate physical appearance with morality and good character; a skinnier (or stronger) body is associated with someone who has greater willpower and discipline than someone who does not. Now, I don’t think that is correct or true, but I will acknowledge that I see my drive on strength training (and my inability to do so consistency) as a failing of character–I feel like I’m not disciplined enough to work consistently to ever get to my 2x bodyweight deadlift or whatever.
As for other improvements.. I guess I’ve never thought about it in the terms of “goodness” but I definitely think about trying to be a better person. My sister and my mother were models of self-sacrifice, hard work, and persistence when I was growing up, and because I didn’t deal with as many hardships as they did, I’ve always worried that I’ve come up short when it comes to character. I’ve tried to become a more thoughtful and more compassionate person over the past few years, taking the quote “everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about” to heart. But it’s a struggle.
And in case it isn’t obvious, I think it is a good thing to constantly strive to be better. That being said, I think it works for me, but I am curious if other people disagree or don’t have that competitiveness/drive.
ETA: re. beauty: It’s a weird thing, and I have to think about it a little bit more before I can articulate how I feel about it. On first thought though, I think the idea of a woman’s worth being how closely she fits to beauty gets a little complicated when you’re a WOC who has physical traits that make sense for your ethnic background but don’t fit within western notions of beauty.
I just turned 25 and my two main goals for this year for me are 1) work on my fitness (meaning lifting weights more, more consistent working out, focus on eating healthy, etc.) and 2) be a kinder and more generous person (generous with my understanding and empathy).
The major reason for each was that I have this vision of the person I want to be, and I realized at 25 there is no mythical “someday” where I would transform into this person. I had to start being that person now.
I also realized that I was angry a lot. I’d yell at other drivers and be irrationally angry at my co-workers for being annoying or slow or not nice people. I realized it’s so much easier and less stressful to just be the person who lets things go. (Now, sometimes anger is warranted and powerful, a la Audre Lorde, but I’m talking small interpersonal situations here.) Someone cuts me off now, and I of course get angry for a second (um, hello, you jeopardized my life and the lives of others around you) but I try to understand that this person probably just had a crappy day and wants to get home as much as I do, and I let it go.
All this to say, yes, I think about both a lot.
“The major reason for each was that I have this vision of the person I want to be, and I realized at 25 there is no mythical “someday” where I would transform into this person. I had to start being that person now.”
A-freakin-men. This is something that I have slowly realized myself over the past year.
yup yup yup!!! Exactly this.
Gah that was my first ever post and I was nervous, thanks for the comments back!
My journals up to age 18-ish were almost exclusively about horse riding and the odd bit of self-pity regarding unrequited school crushes. I stopped journaling at around 20 and don’t feel any the worse for it, to be honest.
I still sometimes write down goals and things (I’m sure this is a well-known self-improvement technique) and use a training log when I’m working towards something fitness-wise (it keeps me on track and it feels great to write ‘awesome workout today! I did xyz AND then abc afterwards’) but obviously emotional/personal improvements are less easy to track/set goals for.
I was just thinking about this! I think I may have more of an impulse to work on my character because of my religious upbringing, but that has never really translated into much action – I have thoughts about social justice, and conversations about it, but I don’t volunteer and I am not an activist. This makes me feel like a hypocrite. I think I have tried to become more tolerant and kind in the last few years, partly because I got tired of negativity and snark, and partly because relationships function more smoothly this way. Mostly, though, my efforts have been focused on becoming more organized, and exercising and cleaning my apartment regularly.
I do think it’s true that orthodox health and eating habits have replaced religious piety, at least among the secular, urban middle and upper-classes. (See that piece on Whole Foods that was circulating this week). Although religious piety so often involves bodily asceticism and dietary restriction that I’m not sure how different we really are in the end.
I actually have been striving to be better lately. This is mostly because I started therapy, a depression skills class, and brain medication, so I’ve been thinking about my self and my motivations a lot in very specific terms. I guess I’m not so much trying to be objectively Better–although I’ve been more conscious of my impatient, angry moments, and I’ve been trying to work on those too–but I’m trying to be kinder to myself, and thinking about what that entails. Kinder doesn’t always mean easier, and (especially since we had our Opposite Action lesson at the depression skills class last night) I’m doing my best to remember that challenging myself a little, especially in terms of my depressive and anxious behaviors, is ultimately a better thing to do for myself than to let everything be easy all the time.
I spend more time mentally berating myself about ways in which I should be better than I do actually striving to better myself.
I feel you. “I’m so tired of worrying about what I’m supposed to be doing that I’ll just sit here, refreshing the Toast and the Hairpin while drinking some beer..”
This is so timely – I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I was raised a fairly serious Protestant, so constant attempts at self-improvement just seem like a matter of course. I fell out of Christianity and into feminism about six years ago, so that drive to be better and to be deliberate in my thoughts and actions never went away. I consciously try to be respectful, thoughtful, and especially anti-racist. But my adolescent fretting over my body did calm down as I left the church (thanks, feminism!). I’m guilty of just following feminists on Twitter instead of “doing something meaningful” (at this point I’m disillusioned enough with democracy to not even know what that would look like). However, I do think direct action on Twitter is actually effective and worth my time (this is what convinced me of it: http://www.furiousandbrave.com/2013/07/tweetfreed…. But I also often forget that I work at a nonprofit for a living. I sincerely believe in the mission of the organization but I often beat myself up about it because it’s a bit establishment, I’m “only” an admin, and I get paid for it. So I try. But I could always do more…can you tell I’m in quarter-life crisis mode today?
When I think about losing some weight, or hitting the gym, or buying healthier food, part of me feels like I’m doing it for myself. But another part of me feels like I am fulfilling some greater societal good. Being heavy or out of shape is increasingly frowned upon as being a public health hazard, or at the very least something that is offensive and uncomfortable to others. This is a bad thing, when people care less about their own health and wellbeing and more about “looking the part” and not offending other people by taking up a little extra room on the train or perpetuating some kind of “obesity epidemic”. Being fit has unfortunately become a morality issue.
I think the key part of Nicole’s question, for me, is this line: “I try to be good to others, but that’s so bound up in wanting to be liked that it doesn’t seem possible to speak of it in a vacuum.” The thing that doesn’t seem to have changed between the 19th century and now (and I study the 19th century, so I spend a lot of time immersed in c19 gender norms) is the expectation that women will improve themselves *for the benefit of others.* Because you exist to serve others, you should be kind to them, or look pretty for them, or whatever “they” want in your particular century. Much of the time this is dressed up in the language of self-improvement–be better so you’ll feel better–but it boils down to “Be what I say you should be.”
I say that, not to be accusatory or cynical, but because I think you have to get it on the table so you can live your life in spite of it. There is, of course, always the option of rejecting these expectations entirely, refusing to be good or healthy or pretty because you don’t want to bow to others’ expectations. But this can be very counterproductive, since being mean for the sake of being mean, for instance, is pretty much the surest way to make yourself unhappy; you can cut off your nose to spite your face. And so you have to find this narrow space that you can live in where you do the things that make you feel happy and healthy (taking care of your body, being kind and socially engaged, looking the way you like to look) because you want to do them and not because other people expect you to do them. I’m almost forty, and this, I think, has been my lifelong task: this striving to be the person I want to be because it’s what’s best for me and not because it will make other people happy. It’s a form of meta-self-improvement, I suppose.
And on the religious question: I grew up fairly conservative/evangelical, and while I still consider myself religious I have abandoned the conservatism and a lot of the judgmentalness (not a word) and self-recrimination that come with it. But I’m thankful for that upbringing because I credit it with making me into the kind of person who cares how I treat others, who thinks that the good work you do in the world is your most important legacy. (I’m not saying religion is the only way to get that stance toward the world, simply that it’s the way it came to me.) I’ve been trying to maintain that attitude–to continue becoming a better person–while shedding some of the less helpful parts of my religious background. I don’t mean to suggest that I’m the world’s best person–I am a coward, for one thing, and always afraid to stand up for the things I think are important–only that I value the struggle as much as the outcome. (Sorry for the long post, but I love this question.)
I’m going to make a very obvious statement: when we try to better ourselves physically, we do it through physical, outward means. When we try to better ourselves spiritually/behaviorally, we do it through internal means. I don’t disagree that as a society we’ve moved towards valuing the physical body, but I don’t think it’s at the expense of our “spiritual” (for lack of a better, all-encompassing word) body. It’s just not as noticeable when we’re improving our internal selves.
I spend 30 minutes a day exercising, but I spend countless minutes and hours trying to be a better listener, be more organized, be more empathetic. If I wrote in my high school journal, “I need to LIGHTEN UP! I need to stop being so grumpy and emo!”, the way I would go forward with that is constantly evaluating myself during interactions with others, monitoring my mood, being more self-aware. Just because we don’t see others (or even ourselves!) putting an emphasis on improving our internal selves, doesn’t mean we aren’t.
Cliff notes version: Give yourself credit! You likely spend a lot more time improving your spiritual/social/behavioral self than you do your physical body, it’s just internal and not as easy to recognize.
I mostly agree with this, although I also find that improvement in one area sort of begets improvement in another and in the end they’re not really different in my world experience. First off, I’m a little inclined towards the yoga-for-everyone side of things, although I am not (and hope never to be) That Girl. Nonetheless, that’s a discipline that works for me both physically and spiritually at the same time, and I understand that for those super-weirdos who love running (what?!), that kind of exercise can also calm and steady the mind in a spiritually beneficial way. Also, when I’m feeling more centered and whole generally, I’m also inclined to take better care of my body. So, for me, a sense of integrity (by which I mean more “wholeness” than I mean “moral rectitude”) comes from aligning both spiritual and physical maintenance, which often work in tandem in my world.
This is not to say that I take issue with your Cliff(e? hahaha) Notes version of things–right on for that one. Just that I’m not sure that I 100% buy the mind/body dichotomy upfront there.
I recently pledged to practicing “niceness” with the boyfriend. What this means is that we each try on Sunday to come up with one nice thing we did in the week. It doesn’t have to be a big thing- here are some examples: A friend was talking about something boring, and I didn’t try to change the subject. A friend wanted me to go to a stupid theater thing and I went and I didn’t say anything about how stupid it was. I wrote a postcard to a friend and a card to my grandma.
The thought went that there are no real sacrifices we have to endure as modern young(ish) people in a decent city- we hang out with people in their 20s and 30s exclusively, we mostly have enough money, there’s nothing pushing us to do things, to engage with a bigger community. We could just go to the gym and work and pat ourselves on the back for doing those things well, because those require willpower, and culture would give us kudos for being “good” people, even though at best I think that would make us merely “neutral” people. So this is our empathy program. Its not complex and there’s no punishment- we don’t beat each other up for not having a nice thing, its just an attempt to try.
My big challenge of the year is to find a volunteering opportunity that I really like and do that.
Oof, I am really struggling with this, focusing on my body as a means of bettering myself. Especially with regards to my body, because I was in great shape a year ago and then had a traumatic injury that really derailed my fitness and body image. I gained a bunch of weight, and now I’m just beginning to try and get fit again, but I constantly think about weight and not wanting to appear fat rather than inner fitness.
Aside from that, there are two things I try to employ in all my interactions: empathy and conscientiousness. To me, those two things are so fundamental to “goodness” and being a good citizen of the world, that most “good” things I do stem from one or a combination of those two.
I am a perfect and unassailable human being. I have no need to dwell on such matters.
There’s also the whole realm of performative Goodness that is about impact on the environment and on broader impersonal systems or people to whom you have no direct connection – worrying about one’s carbon footprint, about buying sweatshop products or shade-grown coffee, about earning money from an employer that is exploiting people near or far. I think I probably think more about that stuff and am more worried about falling horribly short there than I am about my moral status with regard to personal relationships and human connections.
I mean, it’s not perfect, but I do feel like we’ve reached some cultural consensus that sexual virtue is no longer an issue, that individuals should not let self-abnegation become self-destruction, and that persons of both genders are human beings owed basic dignity and respect. (I suppose the first two flow from the last.) I think this means the interpersonal stuff is way less fraught than it used to be.
I love them so much!
And donating to them is a key plank of my "I need to be a better person" platform, carefully laid out in numerous journal entries, so ORIGINAL POST CONNECTION.
dudes, this is exactly that part in BOSSYPANTS where she says: “These are dark times. Back in my Wildwood days with Janet, you were either blessed with a beautiful body or not. And if you were not, you could just chill out and learn a trade. Now if you’re not ‘hot,’ you are expected to work on it until you are. It’s like when you renovate a house and you’re legally required to leave just one of the original walls standing.”