When we’re young we seek to craft our identity. We see a blank canvas. To most, this is exciting; we can write on this and create who we want to be. That’s the dream, right? Is that what the adults meant who always tell the high schooler, “Have fun … these are the best days of your life?” That sentiment seems as depressing to me now as it did back then, but they must have meant something by it. Somewhere along the line, growing up, this sentiment gets kicked aside and we grow up – or grow complacent or disillusioned. Somewhere along the lines we begin to craft out our identity through others; who we’re around, what we do vs. what they do. Our own identity, filled with such vigor and abundance, gets casually faded with each wash of distrust. Our identity is molded to the world we molded ourselves around, and the result is anything but a trace of who we once were. Some call this growing up, some call this growing callous.
What is it truly, though, with age that demands a sense of identity not crafted from what is possible, but crafted from what’s responsible? When did the basics become the governing force for our dreams? When did it become fashionable, to ourselves, not to travel and be apart of movements -but to live a certain lifestyle of predictability and responsibility?For many, love is to blame – with love comes joint bank accounts, joint loans, joint responsibilities; before even adding a child to the mix, you no longer find your identity in living for yourself, but in living for that other person.
For others, the blame seems to lie on the expectations others place on us, but it really rests with our own expectations of needing to meet their expectations, no matter how far from our heart the actions themselves to reach such expectations may be. We don’t want to hurt or disappoint those around us, so we begin to consider their wants for us; a seemingly slight but very important difference from considering the needs of other people. Or perhaps we feel pressured to become that “perfect guy” or that “perfect employee”, or we gain a lust for the typical culprits – power and money. No matter how it came about, though, we find ourselves a shell of the identity we once had. And it’s not growing up and maturing – it’s settling and becoming complacent.
Life needs to be shaken up, torn apart, and lived. Identity for who we really are needs to return – and it’s not merely an identity we had when we were young, but it’s about identifying with that honesty about ourselves that we once had … that value of honesty that’s still in there deep, somewhere, waiting to be rediscovered. Then we can walk outside and observe the world around us once again and see the world’s possibilities for what they are, not what we have constrained them to be.