Who Are You? My Search for Identity.

My entire life I’ve been told by parental figures, church members, doctors, peers, teachers, and even strangers what should matter the most in my life. They always gave this “free” advice in correlation with an emphasis put on things. Things I should care about, things I should have, and how to get it all. Work hard, don’t do drugs, study, listen to adults? But even as a young child, quizzically I would always wonder: but what about what I want? What about my moral compass? Sure, they allowed me to chime in for meal choices here and there. But as long as I remember, I don’t remember being asked much of anything, I remember being told.

The journey was emotionally draining and ill-advised. This same path to grow up, go to college, get married, buy a house and start a family was an empty pursuit and only guaranteed to individuals of a specific socio-economic background.

Even if the chances were high of you accomplishing these tasks by a certain point in your life, would you want to measure your life by these events? Would any of these add value?

There were always major pieces of the grand puzzle missing from the advice they gave me and did not take into account I never had the proper tools.

Tools for what? Life, because let’s face it: life is a game. To play the game, you must know the rules. To understand them, you must have the tools to respond to the curve-balls that the game of life will throw at you. And there will be many. So many, that you’ll find that mid-life crises are no longer reserved strictly for the middle-aged; I’ve had them as early as sixteen years old.

The crises I experienced were not intense episodes of teenage angst, they were traumatic slaps in the face from life. I realized during these crises I should have had my life figured out before I left the uterus. I found myself repeatedly in situations when inquiring minds asked: What’s your plan? As if I ever had a plan.

It was simple: my plan was survival, and I was barely doing that. My primary care doctor prescribed me my first anti-depressant at 14 years old. His response was to me admitting during a routine physical I often thought about “not being here anymore”. Following the physical they shipped me off to the therapist once a week.

There was only so many coping mechanisms the therapist could provide to a young girl whose family didn’t make her a priority.

As long as I followed this advice, my life would fall into place in a manner deemed correct by society. I found that this wasn’t the case, because none of these priorities aligned with whom I felt I was becoming as an individual. When I took the time to analyze who I was, I knew I didn’t want a God, any god, telling me whom I should be or who I should love and that it’s my obligation to have children. No one will order me to become someone who doesn’t align with my vision of myself.

How I got to the place where I was not only comfortable with whom I am, but loving it is something I look forward to discussing in a future blog.