Identity

I think I'm having an identiy crisis.

Or, I was. Maybe I still am? It's hard to tell. I'm certainly more than usually interested in certain questions that are often thought to be beastly and/or immature to expend mental energy on.

But here's what I've learned in the last four days:

I don't have to live up to anyone's expectations or ideas of good.

I mean, that should be self-evident, right? And when I say I've learned this, I don't really mean I'm ready to implement it. I will certainly still be chasing external validation for years to come.

But... when I don't get that support, that pat on the head, that "Well done!" murmured into my hair while someone wraps arms around me and holds me close, maybe I'll remember this, right now, and remember also that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. If I'm satisfied, then it's enough. Maybe I'll remember. Probably it'll take "learning" this several more times before that happens.

Which brings me to the question that I'm now wrestling with.

Am I satisfied?

No.

Why not?

I don't know. I can't separate my dissatisfaction with the ways in which I am perceived and receieved and judged and held to account from any internal dissatisfaction that may (or may not) be festering. Part of me wants to lay whatever nagging sense of "not doing good enough" I have lurking in my breast right at the feet of other people. But, that would be too easy.

We are each of us responsible for ourselves. We're responsible, ultimately, for finding our own happiness, for living our own lives, for coming to our own fulfillment. To push that task onto someone else is the height of selfishness. So, laying any dissatisfaction with my life and the things I do on someone else's shoulders, anyone else's shoulder's, is not a thing I am comfortable doing. I don't want to be that person that is selfishly putting their burdens on another.

Some part of me feels that people who love you should willingly shoulder some of that burden for you, though. Some part of me feels that loving someone is the act of attempting to ease burdens, without being asked. Pay attention, recognize need, help. That's how love behaves. Isn't it? That's how love should behave. That's how we who love should behave. But by that measure, there are strangers out there that love me more than the people I say "I love you" too, and strangers that I love more than those, since there are strangers I am more capable (and sometimes more willing) to help than my loved ones.

Perhaps it's true that familiarity breeds contempt. We can't help but start to take for granted that which we feel entitled to by virtue of some concept of love. And once we start to take actions of love for granted, they no longer seem like acts of love; they become merely what we are due, and we demand ever-greater feats of validation, of proof, of love and sacrifice to continue believing that we are loved.

It's a neverending spiral, moving up or down as you see it, positive or negative, up to the blissful heights of heavenly perfection in which we have obliterated a self for another and they have done the same and we have essentially swapped care of ourselves, or down to the depths of hellish despair where nothing is ever good enough, where nothing we give nor nothing we ever receive manages to prove that we still love.

But if familiarity breeds contempt and there's no way around it, then there's no hope for any long-term relationship. We should all wander the earth as half-strangers, helping when we think we are needed, being helped by those that think we need it, and allowing the connection to fizzle out as soon as whatever it is has passed. We should never try to develop or deepen our relationships. We should be forever generous, loving strangers to each other.

How depressing.

I don't want to live in a world of strangers! Even generous, loving ones.

So how do we continually prove that we love, and continually accept that we are loved, without starting to trod that spiralling path that leads to utter disaffection or complete loss of self? How do we tread water and still get where we want to go?

I don't know.

I would like to know, though. I would like to know how to be happy for praise, hungry for it even, without trying to curry it. I would like to know how to not feel guilty when I can't help someone that something in me whispers I ought to know how to help. I would like to not be contemptuous of the familiar comforts that were once new and fresh and perfectly capable of lifting me up.

Perhaps I haven't resolved the identity crisis yet. Perhaps if there's a solid enough sense of self, of purpose, of skill and craft and art and love, of ideas, these aren't questions that need to be asked or pondered.

So. Am I satisfied? No. And it is my responsibility to change that. But it would be good to be loved, anyway. While I do that.