Becoming who we are

Every day we wake up we choose who we are…who we will become. Everything we do every day, every action, every word, every movement comes back to who we are. Life sometimes teaches us lessons we don’t even realize mean anything until a lightbulb goes off.

It’s like we come to a path in the road and we choose, we choose one way over another and we try to make the best of it…..we search for the answers we don’t really need, we don’t even know we don’t need them until we come up empty. This isn’t who I’m supposed to be. Every mistake we make is a chance to learn, everytime we fail, we are just learning to become who we are.

What if we don’t really want to be THAT person anymore? What if we no longer want to be the person we have become? Is is that easy to choose a new us?

That my friends, is a whole new question and process. We grow up with an idea of who we are and who we want to be. We learn this from the people in our lives….or the lack of people in our lives. We become who we think we are supposed to be. If you grew up with people who valued education and hard work, that’s what you do, that’s who you become. If you grew up with people who valued art, imagination and free will …that’s who we become……with very few exceptions, we become who we think we are supposed to be. It’s only once we become an adult and strike out on our own that we suddenly decide there is more to life, to us, to the choices we make than the world we’ve created for ourselves. We begin to learn who we are.

There are lots of stories of those who grew up in a “good family” and yet they took the path less traveled…they didn’t follow in anyone’s footsteps…they became their own person. They live their life according to their own beliefs and rules. They veered off the path that life had set out in front of them only to find their own trail. My question is…..how do you know your who you are because it’s what YOU want to be or it’s what you THINK you’re supposed to be?

I always thought I’d be a wife, a mother, a teacher, a totally independent person who doesn’t need anyone for anything….I am woman hear me roar. I never imagined I’d be single, childless and sit behind a desk 8 hours a day working on someone else’s idea of success, someone else’s dream….never thought I’d have this life. Not to say it’s a bad life or an unimportant life, it’s just not at all what I imagined I’d be. I recently found an old journal of mine from when I was 12/13. Now I know the angst of being a pre-teen has its own issues but once you get past them (my sister stole my nail polish – my brother is such a jerk! Why won’t that boy notice me!?) once you get past the petty everyday pre-teen problems you can see the smattering of dreams sprinkled in there. I wanted to BE someone…I wanted to BE something…..I wanted so much more that I even knew. I often said things like “I can’t wait to have my own place” or I made lists of all the things I would buy once I got to have my own money…..it’s silly really - it was things like having more records (yes I said records!) or going to concerts or buying the clothes I wanted or the furniture I thought was super cool. I wanted sooooo badly to have a chair shaped like a giant hand…..why? because it was going to be AWESOME! But in there are the dreams of who I thought I would be….I wanted to be a teacher, I wanted to work with kids, I wanted to have a life of play and carefree fun…..but the reality is…that’s not what being an adult is. There are bills to pay, a house to clean, clothes to be washed, grocery shopping to be done, bathrooms to clean……so much we take for granted as a kid…..sooooo much.

But knowing this…knowing full well now that we have the choice to be who we want to be – how do we choose? Everyday we have the option to change who we are, we can’t change anyone else’s idea of who they THINK we are, but we can change who we THINK we are. It’s all about choices. We choose each and every day the things we do and say. We choose our attitudes, what makes us happy, what makes us feel of value, of importance. It’s no one else’s choice but our own. We choose to keep people in our lives, we choose to let them go. We choose new jobs or to stay at one we hate. Every choice, every movement, everything we do creates who we are.

Who will you choose to be?