When you meet someone for the first time, what is your line? Who do you declare yourself to be?
In other words, what is the image of yourself that you present to the world?
Who we are, and who we believe we are, seem like the same thing but that is not necessarily so. We identify with certain groups, be it ethnic, career-related, geographical or perceived class. Most of these identifications were beliefs that we adopted as dictated by the consensus opinion.
For example, I am a writer because I write. When I tell people I am a writer, they have their own preformed judgments as to what this looks like. I had my idea of what it was supposed to look like too, but I have since abandoned those notions.
It actually never looks the same on any given day. Some days the words flow easily and I feel quite accomplished, and other days I look at what I wrote and wonder why it is so bad. I write every day but only on some days do I feel like a writer.
And that is okay. I still return to the computer and allow the comforting clickety-clack of the keyboard to fill the otherwise quiet room. Because I identify as a writer, it is what I do.
What is your I am? It can change depending on the situation. You may be a father, a mother, a sister or a brother. You may be a lawyer, a doctor, a plumber or a farmer. You could be a cancer survivor, an anxiety sufferer, a depressed person or the life of the party.
But are you truly any of those things?
Identities are like cloaks that we put on, a shield that protects the real essence of who we are. They are methods that we use to fit in, to identify our tribes, and to either belong to a group or feel like outcasts. They are as changeable as the clothes we put on every morning, yet to us they feel solid and real.
That is the illusion.
The cancer survivor can become the cancer patient again. The depressed person can hit rock bottom and then find the breakthrough of consciousness that catapults him to the top of the world. The life of the party can become despondent, and the mother can lose her child and seemingly with it the one identity that was the most important to her.
The bodies we are in are not even the same from year to year. I am not in the body I was in as a child, nor the one that graduated university. It isn’t even recognizable as the body I was in just a few years ago. It changes, as does everything in this world.
If I am not the body, and I am not my identity, then who am I?
In this moment, and it is always this moment, I am the consciousness that illuminates this particular form in existence.
I identify with no one thing in every moment, so any attempt to judge me is erroneous. Judging someone is like looking at a picture that was taken and deciding that the snapshot represents reality forevermore.
Think about how you identify yourself. Don’t limit who you can be in any moment by clinging to the false snapshot of who you were yesterday.
Just be the most authentic self you can be today.