When we were young children, we went through our days following someones preplanned agenda. Someone, usually our parents, have decided what we are going to do, when we are going to do it. A few years later and we are absorbed into a school system, on our way to being Borg’d.
Around ten or eleven most of us are becoming aware we have an identity or our own. We have not given more than a fleeting thought or two of who we are, but we know we are our own something.
It all starts falling apart when we reach our teenage years. We were doing fine, being a part of the whole, and having fun. We sit in our class with our friends and a few not so friends, and we start thinking we need to be a little different. We feel a need to stand out and have our own identity.
Where this urge comes from some think is peer pressure and media influencing us without our ever realizing it. Perhaps we participate via applying peer pressure on other teens. What I find so obvious looking back on the whole process is: I was changing, or at least trying to, and I had no real idea who I was to start with! Does that thought sound familiar?
Almost all of us, except for that little group we never want to be seen with, were all busy trying to be unique, be different, and find ourselves. We wanted to discover who we were and find our life path. It turns out after the fact, we not the best at placing the idea of finding ourselves in action.
What we did instead was find everything and anything we could that generally led us as far away from ourselves as we can possibly get. The clothes we wore were suddenly not good enough. We have to have different clothes, and we were not happy until we have enough clothes to wear through the school week, plus different clothes on the week ends.
We looked for others ways to change. For teenage girls, makeup was the beginning. In a rush to be different, young girls suddenly need to wear makeup. With teenage boys it was usually a change in behavior. We no longer wanted to be seen doing or watching anything that may be considered a child’s activity. We did things in private that we always did, but in public we never mentioned a word of it and chastised those that admited to doing childish things.
In our teenage quest to find ourselves, we turned to those a few years older than us and tried to emulate them. Of course they were trying to emulate those people older than themselves, so in essence we were picking up their discards. A few of us looked for ourselves in less savory activities, mainly the worlds of addiction.
Our actor who is living our life for us continues acting into our forties. Without warning, we relive a memory from our past, see a picture or movie about when we were young, and it all comes rushing back. Like hitting a wall, we realize that in our rush to find our unique selves, all we did was create an acting role. Like falling off a bicycle, we realize we are no closer to finding ourself than we were twenty years ago.
Suddenly that small group we never wanted to get close too seems more appealing. It all makes sense, now that we have left the fog we were living in. That small group of people we shunned, maybe they had it right all along. They too were trying to find themselves.
What separates them from us, is they were smart about it. They somehow understood that what makes us unique had nothing to do with clothing, looks, or language. They spent all these years working on developing themselves instead of the actor we created all those years ago. Now the addicts our age, who have not perished of their personal poison start hitting bottom. They die, or they too finally decide to start looking for their real self too. They too realize that what they are doing is hollow and has no meaning.
Lucky for most of us, we can find out who we are, and uniquely qualified to be us fairly quickly if we want to. All we have to do is take the actor which has been living our life, and send him or her into retirement. Once the actor in us is retired, we begin to have a glimpse of who we really are, and what we are really about.
While completing the process, for real this time, of finding us, we can add another skill and chapter to the book that makes up our life. We all were actors at one time or another. Some of us better than others, though we can all add acting to the book of our life.
Some say it is the media influence, others peer pressure, yet others Satan in the shadows working his evil, which takes us away from what and who we are meant to be. It may one or two of those things, it may be hundred more, but most of us seem to fall the same piper. In the quest to find ourself we get lost in the wilderness. We wander around in a fog, wondering why we are not happy, or at least content.
It feels so good to see those waiting for us, holding up the sign at the end of our trail. The sign that says, “Welcome Back, We have been waiting for you, and we are so very glad you showed up!
