Edoardo Ballerini

If “The Popeye Syndrome” hasn’t been coined as a phrase yet, it should be.  At very least it could be a terrible title for a film that nobody would know what it’s about.  But that’s something else entirely.  Anyway, I’ve been surrounded by the Popeye Syndrome lately, and it goes something like this: people resign themselves to their behavior using the logic, “I am what I am” (or as Popeye would say, “I yam what I yam.”).  I’ve fallen into the trappings of the Popeye Syndrome many times.  It’s seductive.  All you have to do is what you already know how to do.  No learning required.  Just sit back, eats you spinach, punch out Bluto, save Olive Oil, rinse and repeat.  And voila!  You is what you is.  I think Popeye got his catch phrase from Aristotle’s treatise on the nature of things but he skipped a few pages towards the end.  Probably exhausted from all that brawling, poor guy.  Yes, it is the nature of an acorn to become an oak, and for fire to burn upwards, but the acorn-to-oak and fire are, in point of fact, in a constant state of change.  They isn’t what they is.  If you don’t believe that change is happening, I suggest you take an apple, leave it out for three weeks, then eat it.

The Popeye Syndrome is the most debilitating idea anybody can ever entertain.  People change radically all the time.  I can hear the cynics chortling in the background.  Ha!  People are inherently selfish.  Bad things happen.  My girlfriend would never do that with me, no matter how drunk I got her.  That’s fine.  I’m not suggesting the world can be flat tomorrow.  But things that once made you cry can make you laugh.  Things that you once thought ugly can be beautiful.  And fears you once held can give you strength.  Shakespeare, who was a shade brighter than Popeye, tells us “There’s nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”  I nearly had a bloody fight over the interpretation of this line a couple of years ago.  Since I still have my teeth, I’m  confident I triumphed in that contest, so I’m sticking to my idea that it means anything and everything is interpretive.  Anything and everything.  The death of a loved one is painful because we believe it to be so.  It is not inherently painful.  It’s our feelings and thoughts about the event.  Your belief that you’ll never amount to anything, or be happy, is only a belief, not a fact.  Big difference.

You can change.  You can change anything you want to about yourself.  It takes work, but it gets easier the more you do it.  But it starts with the understanding that it’s possible.  Hey, you isn’t what you was when you started reading this.

For the Mineralava Musings, this is Edoardo Ballerini.