Recently I have been thinking a lot about the act of reinventing yourself following big changes to your life.
Perhaps you have been in this place once or twice where you had to cut out certain people, move to another country or just found that your life wasn’t that satisfactory.
One great story of reinvention belongs to a female writer named George Sand, that I have known about since I was a child as she was always linked to the Polish composer Frederique Chopin. Similarly to Lou Andreas-Salomé, her name lives in the shadow of her great affairs with famous artists, even if she was a very accomplished writer herself.
“We cannot tear out a single page of our life, but we can throw the whole book in the fire.”
George Sand
As a young woman, George (her real name was Aurore) married a military officer that nobody remembers about and had two children with him. In her late twenties/early thirties she decided that this life was not fit for her, left her husband, started wearing male clothing (which you needed a special permission for at that time in France), smoking and romancing men and women.
And, of course, writing.
The ‘male/female’ persona she forged was fascinating for the public and let her fully realize her potential as a writer – as people found her interesting, they were reading her novels and therefore she was able to support herself financially through writing, which was virtually impossible for a woman in 19th century.
Victor Hugo said about her once: “George Sand cannot determine whether she is male or female. I entertain a high regard for all my colleagues, but it is not my place to decide whether she is my sister or my brother.”
George needed to create this strong image in order to establish herself as a respected writer and later even a politician. A woman who could stay independent, and responsible for her own invention regardless of society’s expectations.
This new identity could have been a costume and even though she was a writer sharing the secrets of her heart, she could have kept her true self, the real Aurore Dupin, as a treasured intimate mystery.
There is a lot of advice on the internet for women about reinventing herself.
Women are encouraged to treat themselves as goddesses, find their own dark feminine energy and I think this is all nice and fun, even if very shallow.
I don’t see any problem with trying to be perceived as more confident, however, I sometimes feel that all of that great advice is only a very thin shield against being hurt. No empowering quotes will really address your insecurities and deep rooted issues.
I also feel like most of this content is not really focused on women as a group of people, but just on women in the context of dating men and gender dynamics.
Basically, the reinvention, empowerment, feeling better about yourself are all presented as some form of retaliation against men who used them or abused them, not a real realisation of potential for the sake of having a deeper purpose in life.
George Sand turned her life around because she wanted to be a great female writer of her age, and definitely not for the reason of impressing men by her independence.
She said herself: “The world will know and understand me someday. But if that day does not arrive, it does not greatly matter. I shall have opened the way for other women.”
I absolutely support anything that will empower women trying to find their place in the world, but sometimes I do wonder why women tend to go on this path mainly after a break up or heartbreak.
Maybe all you need is spring in your soul, a positive reinforcement of your own control that you have over your life.
I think that a good change that will be brought by a positive impulse will be easier to navigate through than a painful soul searching and trying to find a thousand new sources of meaning.
Maybe it’s better not to wait for a moment when you have to: “have now all sorts of good reasons for accepting life, quite as good as those that had made us reject it the previous week.“
