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| © Elliott Erwitt / Magnum Photos |
"I'm the one who decides who I am."
-Sleater-Kinney, Burn, Don't Freeze.
I think when we are younger and less sure of our place in the world, we are more willing to minimize our true selves, to compromise, to make changes that we wouldn’t rationally make if we were able to stop for a few minutes and really consider what was being asked (or demanded) of us. I spent a lot of my teens and twenties apologizing for how I lived, for who I was, and everything that made me, me. Over the last five years, from 25 to 30, I have come to gain a much greater understanding of myself, who I am and what I am willing to accept in my life and what I am not. I am more at ease with who I am. I am more forgiving of mistakes and more willing to see things in many shades of gray, rather than the black-and-white thinking I had as a teenager. With age comes experience, and from that experience (hopefully) comes wisdom. I wonder how people who lack any kind of personal awareness ever evolve. We as humans, all of us, have to evolve. I just wonder how it’s done when you have no sense of who you are, outside of your biological motivations.
A mere two years ago, I still had the tendency to put everyone before myself. Consciously or not, I tried to mold myself to fit everyone’s definitions of who I was or who they thought I should be. I thought this was the way to make everyone around me like (and in some cases) love me more. My willingness to be who (I thought) people wanted me to be, and my bordering on pathological flexibility could have been regarded as a personal ‘mea culpa’ to everyone I knew. I thought that by trying to be who everyone else needed me to be, I was somehow going to avoid the conflict and pain that I would otherwise run up against if I dared to step outside the boundaries that everyone else had set for me and reveal ‘the real me’. I came to realize that while these boundaries do exist, I was just tying myself in knots, and to my own detriment. People (sane, non-toxic, non-narcissistic people) who are in your life, who you call your family and friends, will never agree with all the decisions you make and opinions you hold. If they really care about you, they are not going to take it as a personal affront when you do not ‘see it their way’ 100% of the time. (And if they’re the sort that do take it personally, you definitely don’t want these sorts of people in your life. Trust me when I say they do not have your best interests at heart.)
The gaining a better sense of who I am really started to develop once I had finished college and was living in another country. No longer was I surrounded by all the negative elements of a culture that I could not identify with. I did not feel as though my potential was limited by the narrow scope that others had told me was my supposed destiny. Daring to dream bigger than the confines of life in the suburbs where I was raised saved me from the homogenized culture that surrounded me. The culture that instructed everyone that this was ‘as good as it gets’ and there was no point in trying to achieve anything more because that would be seen as ‘getting above your station in life’. I am certain rejecting the questionable life lessons the suburbs tried to instill saved me from 50 plus years of a 9 to 5 job, a mortgage for a cookie cutter house in a dull suburb I knew I never wanted, TV dinners and re-runs of Neighbours. I was willing to be ‘everything to everyone’, but only to a point. I was not willing to spend the rest of my life having my choices dictated to me by a society that did not know or care who I was or what I really wanted out of life. As a kid, I instinctively knew that there was more to life than this, and that my dreams of something bigger would be my salvation from suburban mediocrity.
Since I’ve entered my thirties and found myself in a stable, happy relationship, this willing to compromise has all but evaporated. I am almost to the point of militancy in my quest to not have other people push their demands and expectations of who I should be on me. I do not tolerate anyone telling me, directly or otherwise, the way I have chosen to live is somehow flawed or invalid. Generalized assumptions based on others negative past experiences and gender-specific social constructs particularly irritate me. I have had prickly encounters with friends and family members about whether or not the career I have chosen is ‘wise’ to whom I chose to marry or where I chose to live. I’ve even had conflicts regarding the friendships I keep, and whether or not they are “appropriate”. One female friend questioned the appropriateness of whether or not one of my husband’s closest friends should also be one of my closest friends, and told me “for my own benefit” that if I continued to be friends with him that “people would talk”. Needless to say she is no longer a part of my life.
The people who are in my life are there because they have earned the right to be a part of my life by illustrating that they are worthy of my friendship and love. They are the people who know me and ‘get me’ best. And I will defend them to the death. There are some things in my life that are fundamentally non-negotiable. Who I chose as this key group of people is one of them. At my core, I know what kind of person I am. I know my ethics and morals are solid. If other people think the way I chose to live is wrong, for whatever reason – plainly, I do not give a fuck. I don’t care who they are, if they’re going to continually try to force me into a mold that I don’t fit, I am not interested in knowing them. It took me too long to learn this, but I’m glad I know it now – never apologize to anyone for who you are, never change yourself for anyone and don’t try to change others.
I think when we are younger, before we have started to form a real sense of where we fit, we often have the tendency to try to be “everything to everyone”. (Girls, especially, are instructed by the culture to try to be agreeable all the time. Don’t take up too much space. Be nice. Don’t be disagreeable. Don’t be forceful or too forward. Don’t cause a fuss. This mindset is archaic and it’s a sickness that we need to get rid of. ) Having a better sense of who you are is not a static thing. This notion of you is always changing, being constantly re-defined and evolving. That is the nature of change, and the nature of humans. We are not static beings, we evolve, learn from our mistakes and change – hopefully for the better.
“To thine own self be true”. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the character Polonius offers these words of wisdom to his son, Laertes. This is solid advice, even three centuries later. No matter how scary or how difficult, honoring who you are at a fundamental level is doing yourself the greatest kindness. Having a sense of who you are is not always an easy thing, but ultimately, it is worth it. We only get one shot on this tiny rock called Earth, and we need to use our time here wisely and to the fullest. Never allow others to steal the truth of who you truly are or dissuade you from what you want from your life.
