How Do You Like Your Eggs? And What That Says About You
In the film Runaway Bride, Maggie Carpenter, played by Julia Roberts, has a habit of leaving her beloved at the altar, running at the last minute from marriage. Journalist Ike Graham, played by Richard Gere, notices that Maggie takes on the passions and interests of each respective fiancé, down to the type of eggs he prefers. When he points this out to her, she, of course, denies it.
With one fiance she is a hippie Grateful Dead follower, with another she is fascinated with the migration of insects, and in her third attempt at getting hitched, she is going to hike Annapurna on her honeymoon. Who is Maggie? She is whatever her love interest wants her to be.
The problem with this is that there is an authentic Maggie Carpenter who has passions and interests of her own. She is a woman like no other, with a life so unique that no one else can live it but her. If she is busy trying to live another person’s life, she cannot live authentically, and that is perhaps why, at the last minute, she bails and hits the road.
But how many people just tie the knot, bite the bullet, accept the terrified feeling in their guts as normal jitters?
After watching this movie multiple times over the years (it is one of my favorites), I have noticed so many people going ahead with relationships that require them to hide who they are. The result? At best, the person fills the emptiness with food. At worst, the person seems like a bundle of broken nerve endings.
The question posed to you, the reader, in the title of this blog post is, “How do you like your eggs?” Do you know? Have you ever stopped to consider why you like your eggs cooked a certain way? Have you ever tried another way? Do you hate eggs but eat them because you have always eaten them? Did you give up eggs and start eating tofu scramble?
The wisdom behind this question isn’t about eggs at all. It is about you. The real question is, “Who are you?” I could add to that, “What matters to you?”
There is a story I like to share from Byron Katie’s book I Need Your Love, Is That True? When a young couple are first starting out, the woman makes the man a bowl of her favorite breakfast food, oatmeal. He happens to hate oatmeal, but he keeps quiet and eats it because he wants the woman to like him. What follows is she gives him oatmeal for breakfast every-single-morning. They get married and twenty three years later he is still eating, and hating, oatmeal.
Oatmeal may seem like a trivial example, but I have seen people add trivial example onto trivial example until they are unrecognizable as people I used to know. In their desire to be loved and accepted, they have hidden themselves. For example, I watched as a young animal rights advocate and vegetarian/sometimes vegan began eating steak because her beloved was a meat eater.
In my case, I was so hungry for someone to accept me that I lost myself. I ate foods I didn’t like, drank alcohol, became a couch potato, gained weight, took medications to sleep instead of dealing with my issues. However, I turned it all around with one simple move.
One day I decided to be authentic. I stated what I liked, or didn’t like, directly, and I didn’t care about the feedback I received. If the person I was with didn’t like it, and he didn’t, then that was not my problem. In time, one step after another of being myself, I realized that being me was a problem for him.
That is the obstacle, really. So many people are afraid to be themselves because they are afraid no one will love them that way. But that is not the real problem. The real problem is that we don’t love and accept who we are. Once we love and accept ourselves, believe that we are lovable just the way we are, then we will stop posing for others.
If we could just coast through life pleasing others, making others happy by being what they want us to be, then I think a lot of us would do that. A lot of us have surely tried. The only glitch is that Life doesn’t work that way. We cannot be happy being someone we aren’t. Our bodies and minds rebel. We become anxious and depressed trying.
“The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike, and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune.” ~Boris Pasternak
Pasternak’s words mirror my experience. I wanted to stop drinking, eat more healthily and remove meat from my diet, and to move more, and I have all done those things. It probably goes without saying that I ended the relationship I was in when I started all of this, but that is not bad news. In fact, I have never felt happier.
Maybe it feels like a risk to be ourselves, but the real risk is in choosing to hide who we are in the name of love. If we aren’t being ourselves, the other person isn’t loving us, just a hologram of us. My favorite new phrase is that no one can abandon me if I don’t abandon myself.
It all comes down to loving who we are and accepting ourselves wholeheartedly. Completely. That is how we live the truth of who we are. Only then can we be truly seen and appreciated by another.
Peace and Joy,
