325. Who Are You… Really?
Who are you? There are essentially unlimited responses or answers to this question. You are and can be many things, after all. You’re certainly not just “one”. Only when you consider yourself to be an amalgamation of these, or maybe even unlimited parts. But here’s where we get tripped up.
We don’t owe anyone anything in terms of describing who we are. A name should suffice. But it’s important to ask yourself who you are. When you describe yourself, do you talk about your roles? Your job, your relationship to your significant other, family and friends? Unfortunately, these are all just constructs. None of these things mean anything, besides to classify other human beings. And often times, this classification isn’t used positively.
I like to break down who you are in two two important categories: What you’re looking to learn, grow and achieve into in this lifetime, as well as what you would like to offer back to the collective. Many times, people are working on their skills, whether they be physical or soft skills (or maybe both). And in terms of their offerings, this is often times how your loved ones see you. Essentially what you bring to the table. A lot of times this is paired up with your job, hobbies or volunteer opportunities.
We hardly ever look at our lives from a bird’s eye view. But in order to do this exercise, you need to take yourself out of the equation. If you were to think about your life from someone “higher up”. Maybe a friend of yours, or an alternate version of you, what do you want yourself to learn in this lifetime? Who do you want to be? Do you want to be a healer? Maybe an educator. Maybe even a storyteller. Many of these things somewhat “automatically” lend themselves to what you can offer other people. However, they can certainly be different. I think that a lot of times we avoid this exercise for a couple of reasons. We are not often times comfortable with our own mortality. Maybe we’re in fear of our own lives, or upset with what we can or cannot accomplish. In terms of what we offer to other people, maybe we’re just too involved in our own lives. Despite its sadness or uncomfy-ness, if you were at the end of your life, what will you have wanted to accomplish? Wo would you have wanted to be? Remember, use overarching concepts and themes, and don’t get overly specific. Yes, there are physical things which can be accomplished, but they always ladder up to an overarching concept or theme. As a quick example, if you want to accomplish a marathon, your themes could be “journeys”.
If you didn’t have a physical body, who would you be? If you didn’t have to work for a living, who would you be? Consider taking yourself out of the “everyday” grind to understand these subliminal or underused parts of yourself. It’s time to stop overriding the true you with your perception of the you that “needs” to be. We never really get anywhere doing this.
At times, these questions can really reach the deepest parts of our souls. What are we yearning for? What are we fighting for? What has caused us an incredible amount of pain and/or trauma? We, as a society, tend to think that all pain and trauma is inherently bad. But what if it can provide us insights of what we need to be doing with our lives, or what we should not be doing with our lives. Can we ultimately “fix” our future, and maybe even rewrite the past? Knowledge is power, and we know this. Knowledge about ourselves can manifest and multiply, so therefore, it’s the most powerful of all.
