WRITE NOW THERAPY!

“I’m nobody. Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s pair of us!” Emily Dickinson wrote this nearly two-hundred years ago. And here we are all this time later still having an identity crisis about who we are. We have it much easier than she did back in her time, the freedom to be who you are today is a much wider playing field than even at the end of the last century. The “Free to be You & Me” generation gave way to unimaginable non-binary titles, sexual orientations, pronouns, fetishes, and an evolving variety of ideas of how we define ourselves today.

Yet, most of us find it still incredibly hard to define our true identity completely. After all, we are not strictly defined by our sexuality or sexual orientation, are we? Our uncertainty of who we are comes from our inability to willfully, honestly let ourselves be who we are. For the most part in society we all act. We put on so many different acts to present ourselves as a person we think the audience will like. We are who we are for our parents and family. We are someone else in front of our friends. Another person in school or at work. The greater the diversity of our friends the greater our act can very.

Comedian Jim Gaffigan joked about how stressful it can be when you mix friend groups. “You always feel like you have to prep  them. You’re like, “These people over here, uh, they don’t know I drink. And they think I talk with a British accent. “  We act like the person we think our friends, family, or dating partner wants us to be. The harder we try to be liked by people, the harder and more complicated the act becomes. It also becomes harder for us to figure out who we really are because we have played the role(s) for so long we can’t find ourselves anymore.

I suffered for years from an identity crisis that pushed down my true self because I chose a career path that was designed to make others happy and wasn’t me at all. Ultimately, growing responsibility kept me in that role and I could feel myself breaking inside. Ultimately, it ended in a breakdown and I was forced to get some serious help. The choices I made in life were my own but the influence of others continually shaped who I was in the world. I allowed myself to climb further away from who I was inside and allowed others to form me.

There were glimpses of who I really was every once in a while but the bulk of my day was spent being someone I didn’t want to be. I longed to be someone and somewhere else but my life path led me so far away from where I wanted to be I couldn’t even figure out who I was anymore. My mental breakdown allowed me some time to piece back together who I was and what being me meant to me.

WHO ARE YOU REALLY?  STRIP AWAY THE ACT YOU PLAY

The first step in figuring out your own individual identity is to strip away who you act like and act for in your life. And, yes, you are “the ever impressive, the long contained, the often imitated, but never duplicated” individual inside yourself. Bonus points for figuring out where that movie line comes from.

Take a pen and piece of paper and dissect who you are acting for and what role you are playing. Make a list. Something like this:

• To my grandma I am the contained, unwild good girl.
• To my parents I am the rebellious wild child who never obeys and can’t do anything right.
• To my best friends I am  the good listener who has lived a crazy stupid life and have had just about every relationship experience possible.
• To the people at work, I am a good listener but also the person they can get to do work they don’t want to. I am a pushover.
• To my ex, I am the unforgiving lover who talks a good game about being open-minded but runs when cheated on and unforgiving.
• To the guy who lives next door, I am a loner who never goes out and gets everything delivered including Thai and Indian food that makes the halls stink. A weirdo.

You get the point. Jot down all the different people you are to all  the groups of people in your life – both large and small groups. This list should take some time. If you quickly do it, you might as well not do it at all. If you’re reading this you’re looking for help and I am offering it. Take some time and do this right.

Ultimately, there is a part of you in all the people you play. What you need to find out is of all the roles you play which ones (there should be more than one) are you most wanting to be. This is only the start to figuring yourself out.

Next, you’ll want to list of all the stuff you do: hobbies, sports, jobs, careers, activities – which ones are you most aligned with? Which ones do you do because they make you happy or feel good inside and which ones are chores or make you miserable? And how do you align yourself with the things and activities that make you happiest.

You’ll also want to strip yourself down to your most basic self – your naked self (yes physically and mentally). Who are you in your body? What do you need inside to keep you going? Strip away all the outside stuff like your car, clothes, job, societal things (social media, tv shows, music, and books you like). If you were stuck on your own without anything on a deserted island who would you be (cliché I know)? How would you live and what would you do if you had nothing else society offers?

That is a tough one to grasp. Here is a link if you are interested in that exercise of stripping away everything down to yourself. LINK

FIGURING OUT WHO WE ARE

When we dissect the roles we play in life, what we like and don’t like in our life, and who we are in our more basic needs and being, we should begin to define the person we are and want to be. Separate yourself from what the world has created you to be. It can be difficult to separate ourselves from the influences of the world. It takes work. Nothing important is ever easy.

Taking the time to work through these exercises and others can help you define yourself clearly and proudly as the person you were meant and want to be. This will give you an incredible sense of pride (not ego-maniacal but in the freedom to be yourself). This may lead to you changing your relationships a bit and may even change your career path. To be more aligned with our true self should be life changing. Anything that doesn’t allow us to be that true self is counter-productive. You don’t want that. You have proven that by reading through this article.

You want to be the person when someone asks you, “Who are you?” you can say with a smile and confidence  and be proud of  who you are and all you do It be that person is to define true happiness.