Me and not me.....

I've learned a valuable lesson, a little late in life, that I should never be told who I am, who I am expected to be, who I should be, what I should say, and act like and when I should shut up.... I was defined by someone else as to who I was or who I should be for a pretty long time. In coming to a cathartic moment and looking back over that time in life, it was a very harsh reality that slapped me in the face pretty hard. "The Me I should have been" and "the Not me that I was shaped into by someone else" came face to face and squared off. It was like a meeting of the immortal warriors a la Highlander, and there could be only one. It's a pretty sobering moment too. Do you stay with the life that you're comfortable with? The ennui of what you're used to and is safe and easy and be miserable or do you embrace the fact that THAT is not your life and you should probably go out and seek it for yourself and maybe perhaps be happier for it? Pretty deep questions that you have to ask yourself there. And never with easy answers.

Then when you come to the conclusion that you ought to be who you are, standing firm to that and not letting anyone sway you can be a cold and lonely place to have to be as you sort out who you are and generally, that has to be done on your own. It really can't be done for you. It's sometimes difficult to see what was someone else's definition of your life was or what the pieces are of how you define it for yourself . It's a process that rips you to pieces. The true test of character comes when you can pick up the pieces of you that DO define you and put them back together to to rebuild yourself to who you are supposed to be, free of anyone else's input as to who you should be. It's a difficult road, to have to take really deep introspectives into your own life and see not just the positives but also all the negatives. Delving into the negatives of everything that you are is not a pretty experience. You really do start to take a very good, long, hard, deep look into yourself and your flaws, your mistakes, the ugliness that you harbor and it gets even more difficult trying to let them go. Identifying the causes of them, the feelings attached to them, whatever keeps you tethered to them... A lot of the times, you are your own worst enemy while other times, you were made to be your own worst enemy by someone else. It's pretty ugly at best.

I guess the question can come up, "How does a person get to that point?" It's a very valid question. I mean, why would a person want to get to that point anyway? Shouldn't it be best to avoid those kind of situations that would change who you are? I mean don't get me wrong, there are plenty of positive things that can come from change, but the ones I am discussing here today are the ones that end up taking the definition of what you are, tossing them out and having the new definitions of who you are rewritten for you by someones else to suit their needs and not yours. The whole process of becoming someone else's definition of who you are takes years and some of the times, an individual will become so sucked into the "new them" that it becomes reality, while in the back of their minds they still have red flags popping up. Those red flags are quickly squashed and dismissed and eventually forgotten. It's never really a permanent fix though and there does come a time when no amount of lame ass excuses and bullying can get you back in line.... That's when the real fun begins. Starting to break those chains is a fun process, and all, but once the chains and tethers that held you there are all gone, you are left cold, alone, "naked" and trying to figure out how you got there and most importantly, how you get back. After wallowing in that for a little while, it comes time to pick yourself up off your ass and make the steps forward by rediscovering everything that you thought you liked about yourself and find out that you didn't like it at all or finding something distasteful turned out not to be so distasteful at all... It becomes a rediscovery of self.

It's an insane process that makes you strip down everything that you think are and find the core. Then rebuiling from that core using all of the pieces that lay around you, figure out what's yours, figure out what's not and finally bring you to your finished product. It's not to say that there won't be some major adjustments that will need to be made, but that comes a step at a time.. It can't be done all at once. It just doesn't happen that way. It's not some miraculous, overnight process. It's a process that bleeds from one step into another until finally you have a haphazard lump of "clay". Then taking that haphazard lump and forming it back into a person: the person you know you ought to be.

When you get to the other side, there is feeling of pride in that accomplishment. In that moment, you feel whole and ready to take on the world. You feel like you're ready to move forward and you can with great dignity and grace, which is really kind of awesome.

I'm still working on all of my shit, but the road forward is looking pretty nice and looking back over the road behind me, I'm feeling rather accomplished.