I just had a Eureka moment realising Useful Me is not Me.

This is very exciting. What a relief.

I am so grateful the process of writing is helping me think through and is bringing gaps in my understanding to my attention.

I recently discovered Internal Family Systems (IFS) as non-pathologising, evidence-based method to better understand the multitude of selves that inhabit us.

Before knowing the concept of IFS, I had intuitively realised that multiple parts of Me existed, which I wrote about and tried to visualise here and there.

Writing a section of The Writer’s Dilemma this afternoon, I realised a few things, including the fact that I had not identified a part of Me as being a part of Me. This is significant because a great deal of the dilemma’s premise lies in the notion of worthiness attached to one’s sense of usefulness. In essence, what is the point in writing a book?

Until this afternoon, I had identified these main parts of me having ‘Me’-etings – conducting internal dialogues.

When I asked my selves what they had to say about The Writer’s Dilemma, none of them were strongly advocating for the usefulness of the endeavour.

This got me thinking: is it possible that Useful Me thinks it’s Me? That my sense of worthiness is so entangled within myself that I have not separated it out, because I think it is Me?

I think Useful Me only just realised that she is not Me but only a part of us.

Let me explain how she just found out.

One of the underlying concepts of IFS is that to help us figure out whether the Self is speaking or one of ourselves is, we should look for the 8 Cs: confidence, calm, compassion, courage, creativity, clarity, curiosity, and connectedness. Well, let me tell you that the Useful part of Me is not always very compassionate towards itself, which means it needs to be identified as separate. It cannot be the Me, the calm and compassionate Self, therefore it is only a part of Me.

Eureka, we are making progress!

---