Doing and being.

When we're asked who we are, we often define ourselves in terms of what we do: I am a music teacher (my job), or I am a wife (my relationship with others), or I am a writer (my hobby or my other job, depending on the context).

One school of thought in overcoming self-esteem issues or depression is to go and do something. If you've ever been a manager - or a Mum - you know empty it can feel to work hard all day and not have 'anything' tangible to show for it, instead you helped everything else happen for everyone else. We need to see 'stuff', we want to see evidence of our own capability. The production company 10/13 - they made X-Files and Millenium - had a popular tag line at the end of their episodes: "I made this".

Self-worth through industry is all very well, but what if we can't do? There's nothing like a brush with incapacitating injury or illness to challenge our assumption that we are what we do. I spent several months, a while back, being able to do very little. My sense of my own self-worth vanished, not overnight, but within a very few days. I found it very hard to accept the help I needed, and when I did I couldn't relax into being helped a bit, and I found it very hard to be satisfied with just 'being'. (I considered the lillies: I considered them a bit of a waste of space, under the circumstances, but they, at least, were decorative!)

I was fortunate that those around me did not share my pessimistic view of my self-worth. In the end, I achieved a certain amount of 'attitude adjustment'. Which will no doubt come in useful should such a thing ever happen again. And, you know, sooner or later, it happens to all of us unless we drop dead of an unexpected cataclysmic event such as a heart attack or stroke.

So if you're the sort of person who gets bored on holiday and doesn't enjoy idleness, I encourage you to practice, just a little, just in case. You never know when it might come in useful. As the bumper sticker says: we're called human beings, not human doings.

This is post 33 of 100 posts in 100 days.