People forget you can also express yourself by what you choose to admire and support. I've had so much pleasure from beautiful and challenging things created by other people, things I could never make or do.
Mary Anne Schwalbe, quoted in The End of Your Life Book Club
The above lines, spoken by Mary Anne Schwalbe near the end of her life, should be an inspiration to many. We tend to equate self-expression with creativity, but she reminds us that one can express oneself just by going to a museum to admire art. One need not have to actually create art. Nor does one have to write a book or do an interpretive dance or build a rock garden or play the piano or make one's own clothes. To admire such things done by other people says something about you as well. You are the kind of person who notices such things and enjoys such things. These things created by others can be an expression of your own taste, your own sense of beauty.
Her inclusion of the word support adds another dimension to her comment. The people and causes we support also says something about us. This is what I believe in, it says. This is what I value. This is where my heart is.
Some people can afford to contribute large sums of money, which is a way to get noticed. These are the people most likely to get buildings named after them and get their names in newspapers. Contribute ten bucks to the American Cancer Society and who's going to notice?
That's probably why we don't usually consider admiration and support as forms of self-expression. If nobody notices, what does it do for our self-esteem? And self-esteem is often what we think of when we think of self-expression. We want to express ourselves, but we also want other people to notice, then admire and support us.
Yet perhaps the noblest kind of self-expression is the kind that keeps the self in the background. It expresses something about us even if nobody notices.
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