self

Do you know who you are? Do you know what you like and what you don’t? What makes you happy and what makes you sad? What your personality is? What kind of people do you get along well with? Do you know why you make certain decisions or what motivates you to do/ not do certain things?

A while back, my female owner realised that she doesn’t really have a strong sense of self. Passive by nature, she has been accommodating to people’s preferences and inclinations. Hence, she tended to go along with the flow so that consensus can be reached faster, or as the cross-cultural psychologist would say, highly collectivist in nature. She lost herself after years of living this way.

Didn’t help that she has a domineering and over-protective mother who made as many decisions as possible for her. Even the portion of noodles (not instant noodle) for meals! To the point that if she had to make a bowl of noodle for herself, my female owner didn’t know how much to take for herself, coz her mother had been deciding how much was enough for her all along!

Oh well.. my female owner has been stuck in memories. She had been very self-focused as well. “I am fat”, “I am a dodgy psychologist”, "I am so useless... still using my mum's money at my age", "I have no friends" (???), “I used to be this”, “How I wish I am that”, “If I could relive my life again, I would…”, etc..

She has been reading a few books recently and one of them was talking about being self-centred. My female owner never saw herself as being self-centred (coz she would willingly give up what she wants so that people could get what they want). But now, she realised that she had been centring her thoughts and energy on herself. That’s self-centredness too. So, she has resolved to be more God-centred and if those ruminative thoughts come round, she will replace them with “I am a child of God”. There, she found her self-identity. Being fat is no longer her self-identity.