Today I finished painting the bathroom I started on last week. When I first began, the walls were weak green, the ceiling brown. Now everything–the walls, the ceiling, the trim (the toilet, that bath tub, the sink)–is white. Simply white. Room by room, the entire house is becoming white. Simply white. And whereas I’m personally not a huge fan of wall-to-wall white rooms, in this case I like it. For one thing, the rooms were pretty dirty/dingy before, so the white really cleans things up. For another, since the rooms are rather small, the white opens them up, reflects more light.

Ta-da!

This evening I taught a dance lesson, went to the library to take an online class, then helped a friend who’s in the process of painting a room at his work. Thankfully, I didn’t have to paint, just hang a few pictures. However, I also helped try to remove paint from a piece of plexiglass they were using to keep the backs of chairs from damaging one of the walls they were painting. The old paint stuck to the plexiglass when they took the plexiglass off the wall. Anyway, I say “try to remove paint” because, y’all, getting paint off plexiglass is tough. We tried paint thinner, ammonia, Pine-Sol, and even whitening toothpaste (which actually worked the best). Alas, we were only partly successful. At least half the paint hung on for dear life. Finally, we gave up for tonight.

More chemicals will be tried tomorrow.

Today I started reading a new book about Internal Family Systems (IFS), a school of psychology that views one’s individual mental and emotional patterns as separate “parts.” For example, most of us have an inner child, an inner perfectionist, an inner grouch. And whereas a lot of self-help and spiritual approaches would say you should banish or be rid of certain thoughts, emotions, or parts, IFS suggests not only welcoming all pieces of yourself, but also integrating them. I’ve noticed this general idea in several other approaches as well, like anything that promotes getting to know your shadow, or even Byron Katie’s The Work, which suggests questioning (dialoguing with) your stressful thoughts.

More and more, these approaches make the most sense to me because they promote true self-acceptance and unconditional love. That is, most of us think we will love ourselves when we look, think, or feel a certain way because we think we’re not good enough or worthy enough as we are. We imagine a body that weighs less or a mind that’s more “pure” is “better” than the one we have now, so we set goals to change ourselves. However, as Pema Chodron points out, when we do this we create a “subtle aggression” toward ourselves. Of course, it is possible to go about changing ourselves because we love ourselves, because we want to take the best care of ourselves possible, rather than thinking we need to change because we’re fundamentally wrong or unworthy. This shift in motivation, of course, makes all the difference.

Both while I was painting over the weak green in the bathroom this afternoon and while I was doing my best to scrub paint off the plexiglass this evening, I thought about how challenging change can be. Our old ways of thinking and our old patterns of behaving die hard. Lately I’ve been working on not being such a perfectionist, but twice after finishing the bathroom I put my paintbrush away then got it back out because I saw spots that needed touching up. Now, I’m okay with this because I like to do a good job when I work and I didn’t get neurotic about it. This is how I know my perfectionist pattern is–um–losing its charge. I didn’t obsess for the rest of the day. I didn’t tear down all the wallpaper.

I’ll explain.

A friend of mine says that a well-balanced person will see a corner of wallpaper that’s peeling off and, like, grab the superglue. A perfectionist, however, will tear down all the wallpaper and remodel the entire room. This second option, obviously, is nuts, and yet many of us spend our entire lives overreacting, thinking everything has to be just so. We pace the floor or give ourselves panic attacks when everything isn’t. We forget to breathe.

Getting back to the idea that old patterns die hard, I’ve found a major step in changing not-so-productive patterns to more productive ones is first recognizing how the old patterns have been helpful. Tonight I made a list of several old patterns that I think have been trying to “gear down” for a few years now (things like perfectionism, self-criticism, and people pleasing), and for each one listed HOW that patterns came to my aid when I was a child. For example, a perfect, people-pleasing child is less likely to be spanked or yelled at, is more likely to be fed and taken care of. When dialoguing with your different parts, IFS suggest asking them, “How old do you think I am?” Most likely they’ll come back with a number in the single digits. The point: your parts or patterns don’t always know that you’ve grown up, that their “help” isn’t as needed now as it was at one time.

When I think about the all-white rooms that I’ve been painting, they remind me of a blank page, full of possibility. Now, are they truly a blank page? No. There are imperfections. There are flecks, even broad strokes of the paint that used to be there before. Underneath the sink or whatever. This has been and continues to be my experience with change and transformation. It’s not that you start completely over. Rather, you update yourself. You start bringing in new patterns, running new software. You clean things up. You reflect more light.