Galatea

<p style=”clear: both”>Or her inversion.

Because I keep noticing how women try to remake their men. Or improve them. Maybe men do this too.

I reach back to myself fifteen years ago, I made changes, gave things up, tried to break my worst habits or bury them. It took a while to really be done with cigarettes, I still use more crude language but try not to when he’s around, or the kids. But haven’t I always done this? Not just susceptible to influence but willing to try on whole new aspects of identity, change what I listen to, what I read, how I dress if this is reinforced or that is? And wasn’t I improved, weren’t those good changes to make? With the right Pygmalion, isn’t the marble benefitted? (But what about everything that is lost?)

It’s the makeover show. The improvement program. The diet, the exercise regime, the products bought to make us more appealing and attractive. It’s the Cinderella story. It’s the unacceptable-as-we-were, and therefore, forever not-accepted, with one’s origins shrouded in shame, hidden. Only the triumph is only complete if one knows that that swan was an ugly duckling.

One creates, one falls in love with one’s creation. One misses what was there. The white marble is chilly beneath one’s fingers, but one drapes it in elegant clothes and ignores one’s own shivers.

The problem with sensing what story people want to hear from you, what they want to believe of you is that you become capable of creating it for them, feeding it to them, you are in danger of losing the thread of the original story. People line up with their versions of who you are and how you should be, tell you what your problem is, tell you what cures they can sell you, prices ranging from pennies to your self-esteem, your validation of their worldview. Sometimes it’s a pyramid scheme, you must then sell someone else to make back your own costs.

Authenticity is problematic.

Can one create oneself? But what about the models one uses? Must they be destroyed? Is unconditional love possible? Does that mean what we think it means?