The unexamined life is not worth living. –Socrates
One of the essential life questions each of us humans is asked to hold and live into and out of is: Who am I? All of the great religious and philosophical traditions hold this as an essential life question; it was captured in another way by the ‘Oracle’: Know thy self.
What complicates this question and our response is that we are powerfully socialized by our culture – our parents, our schools, our religious and philosophical institutions, our friends, our life experiences [this list could go on]. In order to cope and survive we take on a number of affirmations offered to us by these entities. Be humble. Be proud. Be anxious. Be angry. Be doubtful. Be loyal. Be honest. Be fearful. [What, gentle reader, were some of the affirmations offered to you? Which ones did you take on? Which ones are, now, part of your identity?]
Some of these we choose to integrate into our very being and we look for confirmations; eventually we do not pay attention to the disconfirmations. A trap for us is that we come to believe that the affirmation is who I am. We become the affirmation. Many of us also take on a role and we then become the role. I am an engineer. I am a wife. I am a teacher. I am a loser. I am a worrier. I am a. . . [What identities, gentle reader, have you taken on? To what extent does one of these roles define who you are? What need is being met by making this role part of your identity?]
One affirmation I took on was: I am not quite good enough. I am not a failure; I am just not quite good enough. I know the root of this in my life. I know the many ways I have taken in judgments and experiences to confirm this affirmation. I know the power of it – here I sit so it has helped me cope and survive (part of the power of ‘affirmations’ is that they do help us ‘survive’). I wanted to give it up – yet I hung on to it.
I learned two lessons from this. One is that knowledge does not change anything. The other is that a need is more powerful than a want; all wants will be compromised in the face of a need. I learned that only a greater need will ‘trump’ a current need.
Once we become our affirmations they are difficult to let go of for we have made them part of who we are AND we need them [remember the original need was one of coping and survival], at least this is our story. If we let go of them; if we replace them, we are, in a real sense, changing our identity… WHAT? Yes, we are changing our identity; the very one that enabled us to cope and survive.
Today we might not like a certain affirmation – say, I am a ruminator; what we find it difficult to grasp is that we need the affirmation. WHY? Ah, this is a key question. Even then we have to take it one step further and discern what NEED is being met. Then we must choose to integrate a need that is greater than the current need – no small task, but it can be done. This is long term, if not generational work.
I will offer one more complication to all of this. Consider that those who know us and love us do not want us to change. WHAT! If they accept us changing then they, too, will have to change. WHY? Because we are all deeply interconnected and because they have the same challenge I do – the challenge of IDENTITY.
I am my message. –Gandhi
