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Who am I? You will know who you are when you see who you are not.
WE THINK WE know all there is to know about ourselves. You may believe you’re the reliable one, the optimistic one, or the melancholy one. You’ve probably decided you’re either an introvert or the life of the party. Sometimes we experience a disturbance of some kind in our lives, a trauma or a loss. Seeing ourselves in action during a crisis, we’re sometimes shocked. It could be that we never imagined we could be so strong. Or maybe we’re weaker than we expected or more fearful. There comes a time in most of our lives when we’re ready to admit we are not who we thought we were.
In such cases, it could be that the values we defend aren’t reflected in our actions. We’re in conflict with people around us. Our minds are in conflict with our hearts. We blame or we lash out. We shout at our kids. We insult a friend. “Where did that come from?” we ask ourselves. Confused and discouraged, we begin to wonder what makes us do the things we do. We wanted the truth but seemed to have missed something in our search.
Asking yourself, “Who am I?” means taking the first step back to authenticity, or truth. Our instinct is to cling to the picture we have of ourselves, which makes any new discoveries impossible. Questioning who we are gives us a chance to bring down a few walls—a few stubborn beliefs—and reconnect with life.
Most of the stories about who you are come from things your parents told you—what you like, what you dislike, or what you’re good at. You heard more opinions from brothers, sisters, and childhood friends. As you grew up, you got descriptions of yourself from everyone you met. “You’re the smart one,” they might have said. “You’re the rebel,” or “My, you’re just like your father.” People still like to imagine you in their own way. “You’re so stubborn,” “You don’t know how to love,” “You never take risks.”
By now, you’ve formed a solid opinion of yourself, but consider what that opinion is based on. Since you were born, you’ve heard different people describe you many different ways. They each see what they want to see. And you’ve supplemented other people’s stories with stories of your own. When you meet someone, you talk about your life—past events and hopes for the future. You tell the same stories, more or less the same way, featuring yourself as the main character. How did that character come to define you? Let’s first look at how we tell our story, and then we can see how the main character describes itself and drives all our actions.
We are storytelling creatures. Telling a story is a good way to connect to other people. Most of us don’t think of ourselves as weavers of myths, but we never stop telling the story of our lives. We recount the events of each day as they unfold, for anyone who will listen. We tell stories to ourselves, as if to explain what we’ve already experienced. We talk nostalgically about yesterday and speculate about tomorrow. Some stories we tell often, inventing dramatic interpretations and new plot twists. And why not? Telling stories is what humans do.
You probably don’t put faith in fairy tales anymore, but you believe the story of your life. Most of us put a lot of faith in our version of reality. We talk about the events of our lives reverently, describing them in careful detail. We put on a performance for an audience of one, or many. If we stopped to listen to ourselves, we’d also realize how masterfully we play with emotions. If we took the time to write down the story of our lives, highlighting its most important moments, we’d see how easy it is to fall into our own emotional traps. However, if we wrote it all down a second time and a third, those moments would eventually lose their power to move us. We would begin to see just how much we are shaping our story to emphasize the drama.
Even the best stories lose their emotional impact after the first telling. When we’re finally able to disarm the emotional triggers in our own story, we can recall any event without the usual self-pity or self-importance. We can talk about today’s problems and yesterday’s mishaps without the need for sympathy. If we ever read our story out loud, we’d begin to see it all as a work of fiction, a work of art. And we’d realize that even our best stories don’t tell the truth about us. So if that’s the case, then who are we?
As the old man in our little parable suggested, we’d be wise to first take a look at what we are not.
EVER SINCE YOU can remember, you’ve given the main character of your story power to determine your reality. It has the authority to talk, think, and make decisions that affect your body and your world. It tells you what to believe and how to invest your beliefs with emotional energy. You call the main character in your ongoing story me.
Let’s take a minute to understand what the word me means in this context. Me is the person you accept as your real self. You talk about yourself all the time, right? You say me, mine, and myself countless times in the course of an ordinary conversation. Through me, you say things like, “Hey, this is important to me!” or, “Are you listening to me?” or, “What are they saying about me?” Me is everything you believe you are. Me is everything related to the character you forged out of core beliefs and countless experiences.
The word me, or its counterpart in any language, is a simple pronoun—and like every word in the language we speak, it has no meaning until we agree upon a meaning. The difference is that me comes with a lot of baggage: past memories, judgments, and automatic assumptions. We put a lot of faith in our identity and expect it to matter to other people. Who we think we are develops into a mythology. We share the myth of me with old friends and new acquaintances. We tell riveting stories about ourselves. We send photos to back up our stories. We celebrate me in so many ways.
Me always refers to the person speaking, but we don’t give much consideration to who that might be. We say, “Look at me!” indicating that we want attention given to this human being—but also to this thought process, these frustrations, these expectations. We feel sympathy for ourselves, but to the one listening, “Look at me!” could evoke other emotions. Our idea of who we are isn’t everyone’s idea of who we are. It may not be anyone’s idea.
Me doesn’t refer to the body we occupy. Me doesn’t describe the energy that moves through us. Me isn’t a primal thing, because we didn’t invent a “self” until we learned a language. Me didn’t exist until we began to see the world through symbols and their meanings. In short, me doesn’t refer to anything real. It refers to an image, an idea we have of ourselves that we’ve attempted to put into words. Of course, the words we use to describe ourselves change all the time, because we see things differently with every changing situation. Who we think we are has evolved a lot since early childhood, when we first began to talk and think. Who we imagine ourselves to be still changes—with time, with shifting moods, and with the feedback we get from people we care about.
Our impressions change, but we each subscribe to a general myth, or false belief, about ourselves. Me is a personal mythology, a collection of stories that we repeat to ourselves and accept as truth. Like children with their superheroes, we are believers in me. Wrapped in our mythology, we feel confident to take on the world.
Me is not what you actually are. You are life, or the energy
