remember who I am

I spend so much time working that all the things I enjoy such as drawing, spending time outside, photography, reading and all the new things I want to start doing fall by the wayside. Determined to change this! and especially get away from the computer for a wee while.

i’m learning who i am more and more each day.

I’m using the Native American Power Wheel…4 energies and power directions direct your personal power…spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical.

What do I like.
What do I love.
What is my favourite memory.
Who do I admire (role model).
What is my favourite food.
What would I do with a day alone.
Who are my friends.

perhaps, if every day i wrote a memory down in journal, this would help?

i seem to forget…

It’s such a weird feeling trying to remember the way I was. I was so .. not like I am now…! GAH!

...the “regaining my sense of wonder” thing. It seems, in retrospect, like I didn’t ever forget that, really. I just didn’t like so much who I in fact am, and the consequences of being me, and all of that. It was kind of a bad time when I hatched this goal…and, I dunno, maybe I did forget. Maybe.

I’m someone who cares deeply, doesn’t ever seem to take the easy path between point A and point B, doesn’t flinch away from potential injury, doesn’t flee from morally and emotionally complicated situations. I try to approach people that I care for as naked as I can be of emotional and spiritual armor. I’m a lot of other things as well, for good and for ill…some admirable, some not. I suppose I’ve had a hard time in recent days with being who I am, and with some of the consequences that come from being this person. At the same time, while I do strive with more or less diligence and determination to perfect my imperfections, the core of me I think is pretty good, and I can’t change that without changing a lot of other things, and I wouldn’t want to, I don’t think, honestly.

I think probably what I wanted out of this goal was to actually not be that person, and to somehow remember that I was someone else who was less prone to sustain grievous emotional injury from time to time. I am not, at the end of the day, someone else, however, and I think I’m okay again with the risk of grievous emotional injury. Even if I’m not, it’s all a ticket I’ve bought, and a ride I’m on, and as much as I might like that not to be the case sometimes, it’s not a ride I can really get off of before it’s over. And, as I say, I think I’m okay with that again. At least until the next anvil falls from the sky. Heigh ho, and tra la.

Over the past year, I’ve had a lot of eye opening experiences including, but not limited to, selling our first house, leaving the city we’d considered our home for six years and all the friends we had there, moving to a new country, the shock of dealing with the fact that divorce was actually an option for us (thankfully we worked through that!) and the realization that I had no idea how to handle myself as an individual rather than a part of a family unit.

Lately, I’ve taken more time to do things I want to do because I want to do it, not because society expects it, not because of company guidelines dictating how I look or what I wear, not because someone else might like it… but me.

I can do things in my own time, in my own way and I have no need to feel bad because others may think I’m moving too slowly or not working hard enough. I’m starting to do things for myself, and that helps me stay in touch with who I am as a person.

I’m still doing things for and with my family. After all, they are most assuredly a part of me, but they aren’t ALL of me. I refuse to feel guilty for being more than a mother, more than a wife, more than an individual person. There’s nothing wrong with wearing different hats throughout the day. It’s finding the balance between them all and getting everyone that I have to be to play nice.

Another part is figuring out exactly where my boundaries are. Morally, personally, professionally… how far will I, and how far can I go?

Not for the first time does it occur to me that much of my struggle lies in trying to remake and/or understand myself from the outside in rather than the other way around. Which makes a great deal of sense, when you consider that I grew up in a hyperfundamentalist Anabaptist town—talk about relying upon The Divine Without versus same within.

And I dare call myself an atheist.

In any case, as I’ve learned to understand it, one must literally remake him or herself through Christ—or, if you’re an averred atheist like me or my parents, through Freud. Or perhaps “one” must do neither of these things, but I’ve never been convinced that I’m not so pathological and/or “bad” that I am allowed to give up on this method.

And of course, everything has “meaning,” whether you’re Christian or Freudian (although even Freud said sometimes a cigar is just a cigar). And this meaning is universal, even if you yourself are unaware of it. Chewing ice cubes indicates sexual frustration. A dream about two dolphins frolicking in the reflecting pool under the Washington Monument indicates latent homosexuality. Latent homosexuality, as we all know, indicates a lack of a relationship with Christ, and must be cured. And if one cannot be cured, one must be eliminated. After all, if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out.

And while I’m intelligent enough to recognize that this is all bullshit, on an emotional level, I’m still about five, and I’m still looking for my identity according to some exceedingly rigid points of view, and am thus unable to fully accept that I, at least, am not the “bad” or “pathological” person some perversion of Christianity and the teachings of a neurotic, if brilliant old patriarch have led me to believe.

Yikes. Too much info, I think. But there it is.