let's talk, talk about self identity
identifying
who i am and who i am, not.
the girl in this photo may look happy but what you don’t see is
she’s been struggling to get out of bed in the morning.
she’s been struggling to identify who she is.
we too often assume what we see is all that there is.
“These assumptions we make about who we are and the way the world works - what we deserve, how much we can handle, where happiness is to be found, whether positive change is possible - all greatly influence how and to what we pay attention.”
i have been extremely hard on myself lately;
judging myself,
feeling a shit ton of shame,
focusing on only the negative,
and letting myself feel guilty.
it has been a never-ending feedback loop of;
me trying to figure out who i am in the midst of all these life changes,
me thinking that i had it all figured out,
only to realize that i have no clue,
than feeling shame for not knowing when i should,
to realizing that we are never meant to ever figure it out,
and that we will be “figuring” it out for the rest of our lives.
———
i definitely know the words that described who i was or who i think i am today.
but
can a list of words really determine my true identity?
are we actually defined by those words that describe how we look, how we feel, what we do, what we like and what we don’t?
what i have been really wondering is
“WILL WE EVER TRULY KNOW WHO WE REALLY ARE?”
and
“ARE WE EVEN SUPPOSED TO KNOW?”
“who we are” changes so often, so quickly that how are we ever expected to truly know “who we are” at any given moment.
let alone, have other people identify who we are.
who i am, and who i am, not…just ends up being a list of words.
words that describe who i may or may not be when i wake up the next morning.
i thought writing and seeing a list of all the things that has happened in my life or how i have changed would make me
feel complete, know who i am, stop being hard on myself, give myself a sense of identity.
but it just ended up being a list of things that has happened or things that have changed.
it doesn’t identify who i am.
but maybe the answer is this;
how we look, what we do, what we like, what we don’t like, what happens in our lives, what other people think about us isn’t how self-identity works.
maybe, it is much more than that.
maybe it’s the things we don’t see on the surface, the things we can’t make lists about, or even put into words that make us who we are.
TODAY, I HAVE NO IDEA WHO I AM
AND
I AM SLOWLY LEARNING TO BE OKAY WITH THAT.
i use to be the girl who lived with no fear (except for spiders), who didn’t understand the feeling.
if i wanted to do something, i did it.
today, i am learning to understand what it’s like to live with fear, and what it’s like to doubt yourself on things you never thought twice about.
“Learning to feel comfortable with our thoughts and feelings as they change is the first step in being more comfortable with life as it is, not as we wish it would be.”
here is what i am learning about mindfulness & emotions
To recognize feelings. You can’t figure out how to deal with an emotion until you acknowledge that you’re experiencing it.
To accept emotion when they rise whether we bid them to or not.
To investigate instead of running away from it, we move closer, observing it with an unbiased interest.
To not identify with emotion, how you’re feeling isn’t the final word on who you are and who you’re going to be.
mindfulness isn’t difficult, we just need to remember to do it.
mindfulness practice isn’t meant to eliminate thinking but rather to help us know what we’re thinking when we’re thinking it, just as we want to know what we’re feeling when we’re feeling it.
“Meditation allows us to see and accept ourselves as we are in the moment - sometimes hot-tempered and sometimes mellow, sometimes cowardly and sometimes strong, sometimes ashamed and sometimes proud, and sometimes confused and sometimes clear. It allows us to understand that the way we’re feeling right now isn’t the way we’re always going to feel, and it isn’t the whole of who we are.”