I'm Natalie Lou and you're listening to the baggage reclaim sessions.

Hello hello. How are you doing?

Of all the things that you feel that you wanted to do or should have done recently or over the last few months. How much of that is about who you are and what you actually truly want to do,

and how much of it has been about

being what you think you're supposed to be

and maybe trying to live up to what is an idealized version of yourself.

Our idealized image, this idealized version

that we have of ourselves is perfect or if not perfect better than reality. So here's an example of

where a lot of people's idealized versions of themselves showed up,

and it was at the start of the pandemic and actually during it as well.

Suddenly there was all this talk of hobbies and exercise and what we were doing at home and how we were

managing our work life and so after a while I was seeing people beating themselves up because they were like, well I haven't learned how to play an instrument or I haven't written my best-selling novel in this time or I haven't taken up 10 hobbies or I haven't exercised or I've eaten totally different foods to what I thought I would be eating during this time and I thought I would I don't know spend more time with my kids or spend more time with my partner or that I would do this self work or that I would use the time to do like more video dates or I would go on socially distance walks or whatever it was. Now of course there is nothing wrong

with us wanting to yeah be more than what we are but the trouble is that what a lot of us do with these idealized versions of us is that we don't actually acknowledge that they're idealized versions of us.

And so when we're not happy with ourselves, when things don't go our

way, we beat ourselves up and don't realize that we're actually beating ourselves up for not having lived

up to this idealized version of ourselves. Now for me, in this idealized image that I have of myself, I'm somebody who runs like all the time.

And when I thought about like what all the time would mean it's like, oh my idealized version of me would like go out for a run like every day. I haven't been for a run in weeks.

To be fair, I went back to Running Club a few weeks back

when the kids went back to school

and within a few days ended up like with some weird lower back pain that has only just started to shift like

literally over the last couple of days that lasted like for a couple of weeks but even during

lockdown I was like oh okay me and, me and I'm, we're going to go out running and we did.

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