Who Are You?
How do you decide who you are? Is it the picture other people hand you? The version you think you ought to live up to? Or the person you actually are underneath both of those?
Most of us are raised on the first two. We learn ourselves through the eyes of others and through a running list of what we should be, and somewhere in that we skip the third question entirely. People can go decades like this. You wake up in middle age, or later, and realize you never got around to knowing yourself. That stings, because those were years you might have spent simply being who you are.
We live surrounded by forces that want a say in who we become. Each of us is genuinely one of a kind, assembled from a mix of outside pressures and the constraints we were born carrying inside.
Consider identical twins. They aren't copies of each other, not completely. In certain physical traits they come out as mirror images rather than duplicates, and no two people ever treat them identically or hand them identical experiences. Small differences stack up.
We do inherit things from the people who came before us, talents and limits both. The trouble is that what gets passed down rarely matches what the family hoped for. Parents and grandparents end up disappointed when a child or grandchild can't or won't walk the path they walked.
And picking a different hero to model yourself after doesn't settle it either. You still might not be built for the role. Nobody in my family had finished college. When I went, which was a door my parents never got to open, I decided to become a psychologist. No one before me in the family had done anything close to that.
To get there I set aside some of my artistic and musical leanings. I wanted to be a serious scientist, someone who ran research and demonstrated principles of psychology the proper way. I told myself this was the necessary first step toward what I really wanted: to work as a practicing therapist and to read people well, diagnosing by instinct as much as by method.
What pulled at me all along was reaching ordinary people early, before small problems hardened into serious ones. Writing this blog is part of that. Along the way I also noticed I had a decent voice for singing and speaking and a real eye for the visual, which sent me back to things I'd once tried and dropped: projective drawings, hypnosis, other altered states used in therapy. I had walked away from them before, partly because they weren't considered mainstream scientific psychology and partly because I'd decided I wasn't good enough at them. I'm less sure of that verdict now.