Defining Me.

It’s hard when you look yourself in the eye in the morning and tell yourself that you’re a journalist. Or a student. Or that you’re a serious intellectual. Or that you’re a writer, painter, professor, businesswoman, wife, banker, lover, agent, manager, husband, pastor, chef. I think it’s hard when you see the you that you’ve imagined and longed for, and yet your standard for that mysterious you is unattainable. Your rubric for grading is strict and harsh and there’s no one there to mediate your self-deprecation and your hope.

It would be surreal to smile back at yourself and say, “I’m not what I do” as you straighten your skirt or smooth out your hair or fasten the earring back into place. You wander around accomplishing, goal-setting, attaining, achieving, enlightening, learning, heightening, moving, seeking, making, awakening, all with the “me” we talked about earlier in mind. And yet your efforts are in vain.

This is not to say that what you do isn’t important. In the end so much of who I am gets wrapped up and warped into something that tells me about who I am. I have skills for the job or interest I pursue, so I am directly associated with what I do. “Tell me about yourself,” “well I go to NYU, I’m a student…” Why do I answer this way? Why is my response not something more like, “I like to write but never make time for it so I question my passion for it,” or “I ache when I think about leaving school because I love it so much,” or “I miss speaking Italian more than I miss Italy,” or “I love to eat, I love my friends, I like going to movies, and I want to be a really nice grandma.” Instead I tell about what I do. And of course I do—because wouldn’t it be weird if I answered any other way?

But the point here is, being a student is not WHO I am, it is WHAT I do. I like that roll, I relish in it at times, and yet it CANNOT define me. WHY? What about the people who build their lives around their careers? I say they either haven’t, in fact, built their lives around their careers because they have a passion for what they do but realize that it’s not the be all end all, or they have built their lives around their careers and the result of this is a kind of death. I have been uniquely gifted to do the things that I do, that I will do, and yet this is still not WHO I am. The way I interact with people in my classes, the way I respond to professors, the way I complete assignments… these things point to who I am. But my true character has nothing to do with the fact that I am a student.

I challenge you and me to allow for some separation between self and action—let yourself live as you without defining yourself by the things you do. I’m not advocating some kind of anarchy or craziness that tells people to just go around punching each other or stealing, because actions CAN indicate a lot about who we are and what’s “really” going on inside, but I refuse to believe that our jobs and obligations define us to the degree that we let them.

So next time you’re looking in the mirror and you feel the temptation to squint your eyes and shake your head because you got a D on that last paper or you didn’t make the cut for the new planning committee, or you’ve been expecting a raise by now… don’t do it. Let yourself be free from self-criticism in that moment—not that you shouldn’t have goals and ambitions and be able to look at yourself with “sober judgment,” but that you can give it a rest because it’s only what you do, not the all encompassing and enveloping thing we so often let it be. In that moment open your eyes wide and cross them. Stare at the two blurry figures you see and then spit out all the foamy toothpaste and laugh at yourself as your eyes skitter into place and find their bearing. You are beloved, knit together by the only one who matters, and you can rest in that.