was to be mine.
As I rounded the end of the banister, mere footsteps from my room, I found myself face-to-face with my father. I had pulled my shirt up, securing it there with my teeth, to form a MacGyver like sling for my stolen desserts. As I looked at him, my mouth gaped open, sending my shirt and the forbidden treats it contained tumbling down to the white carpet below. Having kept the cookies close to my chest, their little chocolate chips had melted. As they rolled across the tufted ground, they left streaks of brown goo behind them.
“Anna!” my father screamed, and this was followed with a few choice words not appropriate for this book or most public settings. I should mention that my father had spent hours on end caring for this carpet, steam-cleaning it and making sure it was pristine. I had been caught not only stealing forbidden treats, but had also destroyed my father’s domestic pride and joy. His brow was furrowed and his face was red. I was done for.
I burst into a fit of tears, an effort to distract my father from the disaster zone I had created. Despite my best efforts, it did not work. Not at all. I was sent to my room to calm down and sentenced to a spanking with the mixing spoon. This was the ultimate form of punishment in my household, right up there with when my mother would angrily take her shoe off, wave it in the air and threaten us when we fought too much during road trips.
In my room, I panicked. How was I to escape this torture? After thinking about it for a long time, I grabbed two story books from the shelf and went down to accept my punishment. I would take this torture head on.
“Dad, I am ready now.” I said to my father looking him square in the eye. Mixing spoon in hand, he turned to give me a quick thwap. The spoon made a hard cracking noise, as if it has hit something solid. My dad burst out laughing.
“Anna, what the hell do you have in your pants?” I reached down the back of my pants to pull out my two storybooks. I had used them as armor. My Dad looked at me with a goofy grin and gave me a big hug. He simply couldn’t be upset with me.
Even as a child I was an inventive problem-solver. It’s simply who I was meant to be. Isn’t it funny how it seems we spend most of childhood shaping our unique identity, and then most of our adulthood trying to hide from what makes us different? In this chapter, we’ll discuss how our brain works to understand the world around us, how it makes each of us truly unique, and how to become more self-aware. We’ll tackle coping skills for accepting our uniqueness and learn why it’s not only ok, but beneficial to stand out.
How We Develop Our Identity
Our brains are like the perfect organizational expert from our favorite home and garden TV show—they love to put similar things into neatly organized boxes. This happens with just about every type of information our fantabulous little noggin collects—experiences, emotions, and more. Your brain gets the same feeling grouping people that I get thinking about a shirtless sexy man holding sheet cake and telling me, “I just want to give you a back rub and hear about your day.” When you see a person, your brain goes straight into analysis mode, making observations about their actions, appearance, demeanor, and more. Within as little as seconds, that relative stranger has been filed away by your subconscious in a pretty little box of supposedly similar things.
Our mental storage boxes are called “schema.” It’s basically a fancy science-y way of referring to a generalization about a group of people, places, situation and more. Stereotypes exist for a reason: it’s just your brain trying to keep your thoughts tidy. Think about it. Every thought you have ever had is being organized and sorted into its perfect place. Everything in its box. I often wonder how my brain can be an ultimate store of all of this information, but still cannot effectively remind me to clean my house, buy toilet paper, or do my taxes.
These schemas also help us define ourselves and how we should react to things. Schema that characterize how we view ourselves are called self-schema. When I first started researching self-schema, I had a huge identity crisis. Who am I? I don’t even know who I am. However, a few deep breaths and fifteen hours of reading Wikipedia pages with no relation to this book at all, I realized the obvious. I am who I am.
Your strongest self-schemas are always going to be the first things you use to describe yourself to a stranger. So for example, I am a beautiful, fearless, loud-mouthed woman. I care about the people around me deeply, but I am afraid of getting hurt. I am even more scared of failing. I work really hard, and I try every day to make the world happier. You will always know where you stand with me, and I value honesty more than anything else.
If we take a look at this blurb, we can see it not only defines who I am, but also helps my brain predict how I might react to certain situations and how I might engage with my community. Your brain is basically labeling a box of what you are, and on a day-to-day basis it helps you make decisions that fit neatly and comfortably in that box.
These perceptions of ourselves begin to develop as soon as we are born and are as unique as our experiences, environment, looks, and thoughts are. When people say “Speak your truth,” the truth they are talking about is this pure definition of who you are. It’s how you see your bodies, interests, personality, and behaviors.
They also often become self-perpetuating, meaning that we make choices that continue to reinforce how we have already defined ourselves. For example, if you identify as an extrovert, your mind is going to remind you that I need people to feel complete. It’s going to give you the warm fuzzies when you get invited to a party or event. In the same vein of thought, if you spend too much time alone, it might trigger emotions such as loneliness, to remind you that you need to get out of the house and see some people.
These facts and tidbits about who we are get stored in the amygdala, or the emotional parts of our brain. Which means what we believe about ourselves doesn’t have to be logical or factual. It simply has to be a pattern. When I was younger, I thought I was ugly. Not just kind of ugly—I thought I was hideous. At one point, I even gave up on grooming, because what was the point? I was a fugly teenager, I’d be a fugly adult. There was no point working on the parts of myself that couldn’t be fixed.
I developed this self-definition because I was surrounded by friends, TV shows, and random strangers who constantly reminded me that because I was fat, I was also ugly. In my brain, the words fat and ugly were stored in the same box. For a long time, the two words were completely interchangeable for me. It took mentally redefining the word “fat” to help my brain begin to accept that I could identify as both fat and beautiful. Fat was no longer synonymous with ugly.
Now, changing how we see ourselves outright can be like climbing a mountain in flip-flops—painful and nearly impossible. But have no fear: adapting a schema is something our brain does all the time. Your identity evolves, based on the situations you put yourself in, your interactions with others, and how you feel about yourself. I’ve had many women tell me that seeing my images has helped them see the beauty in who they are. At first I was like, “Lies!” How is that even possible?! They’re just photos. However once I researched how the brain works, it made perfect sense.
The brain sees things bound together. In this case we’ll use “fat and ugly,” but usually in our brains things are much more complex. Now when you see an images of a woman like me and see them as being “fat and beautiful,” your brain gets frustrated. Now the first time it happens, your brain might do just like all my ex-boyfriends, and make excuses for it. However if you continue to expose yourself to this cognitive dissonance, it will force your schema to evolve.
Our brain will be like: “Hold up. Trying to group these two things together isn’t working anymore. They need to break up.” Since these two things can no longer be fit into the same pretty little box, your mind will just have to go down to the basement (of your subconscious) and get another box. But the brain will only do this if it feels uncomfortable enough, often
