Who Me?

As 2021 comes to an end and I reflect on this next year, I find myself fixated on the idea of experiencing more life (places, people, and everything in between) coupled with the odd appreciation for more loss, particularly the growth and acute awareness that accompanies suffering.

This year was difficult for me. I experienced the loss of my own identity through a job, the loss of a handful of relationships I mistook as perpetual, and the loss of a family member.

Often through periods of adversity, we lose ourselves. Sometimes we are forced to peel back our layers and ask who we are and what consequential decision was made to warrant the pain. As I turned 25 this year, I heard the fearful voice inside my head, “Is this the part where my quarter life crisis begins, or do I actually know who I am?” As I connect with more 20 somethings, there appears to be an overarching theme of either not knowing oneself to begin with or the gradual loss of identity over time.

I met with one of my oldest friends for a mid-afternoon bottle of wine in the park, and we discussed the root of that lack of sense of self. She just so happened to be studying identity in her graduate psychology program and made the point that we are constantly living through the human experience and in that, we shape ourselves. Identity evolves and we have the agency to accept who that person is and will become.

With that being said, if we purely identify with our experiences, we are bound to be confused. Every year of my 20s has been incredibly different so far. This feels like it is more about finding some consistent, sustainable sense of being in all the chaos.

Life is beautiful and harsh and ironic, and it would be a shame if we lived through all of it without seeing ourselves grow. It is easy to get lost in dark periods of time in our lives, but that does not mean we are inevitably an empty shadow.

“Thinking without awareness is the main dilemma of human existence” – Eckhart Tolle

The next challenge is taking this one step further in understanding that identity is often associated with ego. To transcend one’s ego is supposedly one step closer to an enlightened state of thinking and being. In the beginning of mankind, words were not covered with labels and humans were overcome by thought and experience. There is liberation to being in the moment and free from the imprisonment of the mind.

I can’t help but smile to myself as I have recently found inspiration in Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, because here I am four years after starting this blog on the themes of his first book, The Power of Now, writing on the exact same concepts of mindfulness and reclaiming consciousness.

In his newer book, he writes, “Ego is always identification with form, seeking yourself and thereby losing yourself in some form. Forms are not just material objects and physical bodies. More fundamental than the external forms – things and bodies – are the thought forms that continuously arise in the field of consciousness.”

He goes on to explain that we do not only chase material items and physical appearance for fulfillment, but we also intensely identify with our mental-emotional patterns that are invested with a sense of self (also known as our ego). If we no longer look for mirrors in other things or people, we might just wake up and stop sleepwalking.

As the end of another year comes to fruition, I am overwhelmed with an appreciation for the moments of joy and the moments of loss as they often lead me back to flashes of inner peace and discovering who I am.

In 2020, I was an investment banker. In 2021, I was a risk taker, girlfriend, and reader/writer. In 2022, I will spend time with the most wonderful people in my life and continue getting to know myself because the more I learn, the more I realize she’s been there the entire time.