Who I Am and Who I'm Not - "The Self That I Long to Believe In"

“You cannot dream yourself into a character; you must hammer and forge yourself one.” - Henry David Thoreau “Who am I?”

The question seems a bit overused these days. In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are. Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to whatever trend is currently trending in the culture. It’s the creation of a self suitable to the world rather than discovering who we are as both in and above the world. And so we might ask, how do we not know? How could we wake up every day and go to bed every night with this person that we are and still not know who we are? How is it that we walk through the myriad array of dynamics and demands of life and living, and somehow not see ourselves in the act of dealing with those things? How have we lived with ourselves yet missed ourselves in the living?

Well, one answer is that we don’t want to see. We don’t want to see because we fear that if we actually look at who we are, we might not like who or what we see. It may confirm our deepest fears about who we are. It may convince us that we really don’t have the capacity to achieve the dreams that we want to achieve. It may corroborate all of the negative things that people have said about us, when we’ve spent our lives fighting against believing that that’s who we are. We may choose ‘ignorance’ as opposed to ‘knowing’ so that we can continue wearing the weathered façade that we’ve found comforting, in whatever way it might comfort us.

Or second, maybe we’ve spent our energies not coming to understand who we are, but vesting those precious energies in becoming whoever it is that everyone says we should become. There are demanding social pressures to adhere to. Heavy-handed societal expectations that press us for compliance. There are those who are committed to whatever politically-correct agenda they’re committed to who are easily aroused and readily enflamed to rage should we refuse alignment with their agendas. There are the voguish trends that demand adherence lest we be labeled as outdated or just plain ignorant. There are the expectations of parents that rest heavy upon us, and the voices of well-meaning mentors that too often called us to some vision of who they thought we were. Therefore, we don’t have time to see ourselves because we’re spending our time trying to become another ‘self.’

Or third, it’s possible that we might have determined that it’s not ‘who’ we are, but who circumstances made us to be. Abuse as a child. Bullying at the hands of thoughtless people bent on propping up their own fragile insecurities at our expense. Jobs lost in acquisitions that sacrificed employees on the cold altar of budget and profit. Marriages that collapsed at the hands of spouses who decided that the trade-off for personal agendas as held against the life of a marriage and a family was legitimate. Enemies that we mistook for friends who slowly circled around behind us and stabbed us in one of the many ways that people stab others. For us, these answered the question, “Who am I?”

Or fourth, we don’t feel that there’s any identity to discover. That somehow we are the embodiment of a bunch of ‘nothing’ that will only add up to nothing. That because there’s nothing there, the need for some sort of pursuit becomes unnecessary and embarrassingly ridiculous. We are what we already know, despite how little that might be. Somehow we ended up at the shallow end of the gene pool, or we showed up late when things were being handed out. We got to rummage through the left-overs or we were looked over. There was no motivation to develop anything along the way, or the opportunities to do so simply never came our way. Therefore, we don’t know who we are because we’re pretty much nothing and we already know that.

Or finally, could it be something entirely different? Could it be that we are vast beyond comprehension? That we’ve mistaken this journey of ‘who am I’ for a destination that gives us a clear and solid answer, verses seeing it as a journey where the answer is always fleshing itself out with ever-great clarity as we go along? That we are someone who is perpetually in the process of becoming more of whoever that someone is? That we are not meant to be something that’s stagnant in time and space, but we are something that is always evolving in a manner that we are constantly advancing into time and growing in space? And to understand that is to begin to build a sense of self that will effectively begin to disassemble our negative sense of self. “Who are you?” Get this stuff out of the way, quit falling into these identity stealing behaviors, look beyond all of that and you’ll begin to see the authentic self.

Closing

Today’s podcast is drawn from the book, “The Self That I Long to Believe In – The Challenge of Building Self-Esteem.” Get your copy today at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or wherever books are sold.

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