A Question of Character: Part I

I have a secret desire. Something is stirring in the depths - a sweet, urgent wish beginning in my centre, quietly insisting its way through layers of repression and denial, and rippling outwards through my whole being.

It is something that I have been meaning to write about for some time, that I have semi-mentioned only very indirectly. That I haven't posted about so far because I have been having difficulty finding even slightly satisfactory words.

But it is not what you might be thinking. My secret desire is this: I think that I would like to be a person of character.

Now, at some level, I think this is a bit ridiculous. Surely I know better to believe in that stale old hodge-podge of half-baked Christianity, recycled moralistic clichés, oppressive expectations about selfless women, and hang-ups about being a good girl that everyone approves of. I have been through all that, and I should be over it by now.

Plus, you know, I am already a carer to my chronically ill partner and therefore in a relationship characterised mainly by poverty and chastity (although not obedience!), a semi-exhausted mummy, a public servant battling against the odds to achieve something good for the public, a woman with fertility issues thinking about whether to have a second child, and I have enough trouble just trying to add in being an effective support to my closest friend. How much more sucky do I want my life to be?

Shouldn’t I actually be loosening up a little more? Even a lot? I just read Trueself’s latest post, and my first thoughts about the question on what we would like to change in our lives were that I would like to have more money, more sex and more all-round fun. I would like to be more slender, more sexy, more glamorous, more "together" (ie better organised) and more successful. I would like to be more of a bad girl and go out and get the things that I want.

And I do not believe that there is anything wrong with wanting any those things. Why punish yourself? Life is too short. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we may die. I do believe, in some sense, in those last three sentences.

And yet, I find myself becoming more and more preoccupied with this question. This question of character. Of my character.

There are words and phrases popping up into my mind at odd moments: words like duty, hard work, commitment, fidelity and staying the course. Words that I instinctively dislike. Words that have an almost irresistible mental association for me with old movies about small towns made up of contented people with decent, old fashioned values, which have probably never existed, sermons with tortuous logic and clichéd examples, and dishonest “family values” campaigns by politicians who always seem to get caught fucking around. Words that, frankly, give me a definite impulse to run away screaming in the other direction. I want to have more fun, I think. I just want to be happy.

But I am also feeling a kind of attraction to those words. The kind of attraction I might feel if I found my grandmother’s wedding dress in the attic. Its a little yellow and cracked with age, remarkably dowdy, probably way too tight, clearly made for someone other than me, and yet there is something about it that draws me in. I know that I don’t really want to be a bride, even a pretend bride, and yet I have this strangely irresistible desire to put this dress on and see how it looks.

I find that I am believing more and more in things that I have read and agreed with in the past and yet somehow forgot, or decided were all very well in principle but too hard and too constraining in real life, and put aside for something more liberating. That life, while it is often joyful and fun, is also very difficult. That happiness, my happiness, does not lie in plotting my escape from the things that are hard and lonely.

My life is difficult. It is not the most difficult life I see around me, let alone as difficult as the lives I see on the news. I definitely see other people who suffer a lot more. And yet, the degree of difficulty in my life is not about how hard things are in an objective sense. It is about the gap between what is required of me and what I feel able to do. I may be experiencing only minor league suffering. The problem is that I am a complete rookie. And yet, I recognise that there are times when you have to step up to the plate and keep swinging, anyway.

My life, effortless as it might be for other, nobler people to live, is almost too much for me. And I am thinking that, when life is this difficult, requiring reserves of selflessness I definitely do not have, even love will not necessarily get me through it. I am going to need something that is summed up by the word character.

Now, this question of what I mean by character is tricky, and I am not sharing this secret desire of mine with anyone in the outside world, not even the Big Dude. For one thing, perhaps because of my religious background, I tend to associate it with obeying rules like no sex before marriage and no affairs afterwards, or more trivial forms of abstinence like not drinking alcohol. With meeting other people's expectations about things I won’t do. Things that I probably can’t live up to and don’t even believe in for myself. Character, along these lines, is mostly about what I don’t do. Its about meeting other people's rules.

And it tends to be about expecting these same things of other people. It is an unhappy fact that an increased effort at sticking to the rules myself tends to make me more judgemental of those who don't and also more hypocritical. I wish this wasn't true, but it is. I have often noticed that the first thing that happens when I go on a diet is suddenly noticing how fat other people are and all the disgusting things they are eating. I have been thinking about character, and the first and regrettable sign of this lately is making judgemental comments about other people.

So there is something fundamentally wrong with this approach. It is deadening, for myself and for other people. The letter of the law kills, but the spirit gives life.

But what if character is actually more about what I do than what I don’t do? About meeting my own expectations rather than other people's? About loving myself, not by indulging myself and my fears and whims, or even my moral judgements, but by becoming more like I would wish to be? A person more like the people I most respect? A person more able to do the things that I never wanted to do, but that the life that I have chosen now requires me to do?

I am having so many thoughts on this topic that it is going to have to be the subject of more than one post.

*Note to self: You have the most tortuous use of metaphors I have ever heard. And your posts are always way too long. Plus, how do you expect people to comment when you post practically every day? Stop doing that!