Real self ideal self and Self love

Real Self, Ideal Self and Self Love

December magically brings forth all those resolutions, that were made in January and conveniently forgotten .Those were blissfully buried deep under the leaf litter of life. When those finally popped up I wonder why did I made such huge hollow promises to myself.

 According to a theory of psychology one tend to or strive to bridge the gap between one's real self and ideal self. Ideal self is what you want yourself to be or what you want others to see you as. The real self is what you think you are. I could see all those resolutions were my sincere efforts to bridge the gap between my real and ideal selves!! 

I retrospect. Why did I lose ? I pushed my affairs back to attend to myriad tasks. Thinking about the tasks, I wonder who told me to take all the responsibilities on my shoulder? Who asked me to push back my needs? It turned out that none asked me to do such sacrifices. But, I was constantly fed the idea of an ideal woman from childhood, who is sacrifice personified. Who, like an expert juggler should handle many hats effortlessly.

You can say it is pure laziness. Or may be I am not such an expert juggler. So, I device another technique to bridge the gap between the selves. I find it can be done both ways. Either I keep on improving my real self or I can scale down my ideal self a bit. I redefine the ideal self by reducing the number of hats that I handle. That is better. I can comfortably walk  towards my aim. Smart, isn't it? Lazyness? Nay!!

This is what is called self love.

Preetha Raj