Identity

It's been a minute since I have blogged. I may be a little rusty. Never too late to start again I say.

I have struggled with my "identity" for as long as I can remember. I mean even as a child. And that is probably because I have ALWAYS felt it had less to do with "what we do for a living" than "who we are as a person." And you learn, REALLY quickly, that your identity gets decided for you by so many things and so many different people. We try to be who our parents want us to be, who our teachers and coaches want us to be, who our employers want us to be, who our partners/spouses want us to be and who our children want us to be. It can be really difficult to tap into the whole who do we want to actually be.

When you meet a complete stranger, one of the first questions you get asked is "what do you do?" And we all know that question is NOT what are you doing with your existence on this earth but rather "what do you do for money?" That answer becomes our identity. Nurse. Doctor. Lawyer. Influencer. Teacher. Manager. Stay at home parent. Author. This answer defines every single metric with which we measure ourselves for the rest of our lives. And if we could stop "working" tomorrow, we most likely wouldn't because we would be bored without the work that defines us. Even though our lifetimes are microscopic and we have an entire planet to explore, our preference would be to remain doing what we were doing so that somehow at the end of it all, we can say we did this ONE thing. And we only did ONE thing because we could do it well. I have never been a one thing kind of person. Always moving on to the next thing that interested me or I found intriguing. My resume may very well read like a person who couldn't get their shit together, when in reality it more reads like a person who found many things worth doing.

I ran into my cousin Jeni once, shortly after I had announced I had completed my certification to become a Life Coach and was leaving my corporate art supply buying job and she remarked how envious she was that I could just up and leave something I had been doing almost 10 years to try and do something wildly different. That she had always wanted to be a teacher and would probably always be a teacher. And she is a good teacher. A great teacher. And teaching was probably always innate for her. The statement made me pause because I questioned how/why I could actually just up and leave a sure thing for something I had never done on a simple feeling. A feeling that I could help others.

That wasn't my first pivot and it definitely wasn't my last. I have always "known" what was next. I have always seen the path before me, not necessarily how to get to it, but at least the destination. Which is how I found myself writing a children's book series. Which ironically was born out of not having my own children to "leave a legacy" to. Instead, I had my first great nephew who was a big fan of books, and I wanted to leave him something. So, after 50 some years, the identity of author appeared, even though I have been writing a really long time and sharing most of that in the form of a blog I shared on my personal social media page.

Knowing I was now a published author, with yet another new "identity" was not as defining of a moment as some may think. And the past couple years I have struggled with "identity" again in ways I hadn't for a really long time. It was hard to stand up in front of people and say "I am an author" and it was hard because I have never felt like it was the answer to who are you and what do you.

Writing isn't the only thing I do. It's just the easiest answer to that question. But "writing" isn't as black and white as saying "author" and even though both of those things are true, society only wants to know how you make a living and pay your bills, because ultimately that is how you survive.

But that's false. I have "survived" doing anything that interests me. Some of those things paid me decently, some paid me not so much. A self published author makes very little money (almost none) without a big publishing house behind them and a marketing/PR team. A self published author has to do all of those things, well, themselves, and therefore means you do soooo many other things than write. You create content. You advertise. You market. You give away. And when you have to do all of those things yourself, you can get a little jaded at the whole "writing" thing and you simply stop writing ANYTHING.

The blog, my thoughts, my random sharing of things some people care about some people don't, took a major back seat to just letting the world know I wrote some books. But I hope this is the start of getting back to that. To sharing again. Because of all of the titles I have carried, of all of the things I have done in my life, writing is the thing that has connected me most to people. Writing is my identity. It IS who I am and what I do.

If you were handed your life back and asked, is there anything you should be doing, how would you answer that?

We are far more, far bigger, than the label we give when someone asks us what do you do.