”The Self That I Long to Believe In - The Challenge of Building Self Esteem” - Part Two

Life Talk with Craig Lounsbrough

“Who Am I?” What the Question Evidences

“Who am I?” The question seems a bit overused these days. It’s something more like a vogue, trendy kind of question that pulls us out of the doldrums of living among the masses and plants us in the more desirable currents of the intellectual mainstream. In our culture, I tend to think it’s less about thoughtfully unearthing who we are as a means of living in awe of what God wrought within us. Rather, I think it’s more about creating something that’s culturally acceptable and that adheres to the contrivances of whatever trend is currently trending in the culture. It’s the creation of a self suitable to the world rather than discovering who we are as both in and above the world.

The question of ‘who we are’ suggests that we’re exercising our intellectual acumen to probe our existence. That exercise itself lends weight to the fact that we have an intellect to exercise and an existence to live it out in. By its very nature the question of ‘who we are’ poses the thesis that we are something other than being nothing, and that ‘something’ has relevance when ‘nothing’ doesn’t. By asking the question we reveal the need that we possess to believe that we exist and that our existence is purposeful. We want to believe that we are supposed to become ‘something’ rather than float around being ‘nothing’ going nowhere in the going. To ask the question is to evidence the fact that we are beings in need of asking the question. And that in and of itself evidences the incredible depth and unparalleled richness of our humanity.

In addition, the question of ‘who we are’ also suggests that a simple answer is simply not suitable. That some cheesy pabulum will not suffice. That the definitions proposed by innumerable philosophers and those who for centuries have probed the inner-workings of life aren’t quite enough. That holding ourselves up against everyone else in order to grasp some sense of who we are by comparing ourselves to who everyone else is simply repeatedly comes up short. That aligning with political hashtags or running off after a litany of causes that have caught the wandering eye of those without a cause don’t answer the question. That even though we’ve gorged ourselves on self-help philosophies and immersed ourselves in the rigors of mindfulness (or any one of the many other popular contrivances) we still don’t have the answer.

And that is not necessarily that all of these things are incorrect or that they don’t speak something of truth into our lives. It’s not that at some level they don’t have some sort of value. It’s that they’re not enough. The cumulative weight of their collected insights falls short. Mankind has asked the question of “Who am I”? for as long has mankind has existed. And yet in the end, we don’t have an answer that explains the whole of who we are. After untold millennia we are still on this search and we are still asking this question.

And if all of this evidences anything at all, it evidences the depth of our depth. It speaks to the innate and persistent complexity of who we are. Stored within the body, mind and soul of each of us there is a vastness that all of the combined explorations of mankind have yet to fathom, much less understand. And can we not correlate this complexity and depth with our value? Everything in existence has value for the place that it holds in relationship to everything else in existence. But we stand apart in complexity, intellect, reasoning and ability. We have been equipped for and tasked with the responsibility to care for everything else and nothing else has been assigned that role…except us. Indeed, does this not evidence our value?

How Do We Not Know?

The ever-baffling fact regarding the question of ‘who we are’ is that we live with ‘us’ every single solitary day of our existence. Yet, even though we live with ‘us’ with a transparent intimacy that no one else in all of existence ever will, we still don’t know ‘us.’ How could that be? How could we wake up every day and go to bed every night with this person that we are and still not know who we are? How is it that we walk through the myriad array of dynamics and demands of life and living, and somehow not see ourselves in the act of dealing with those things? How have we lived with ourselves yet missed ourselves in the living? Yes, as we have stated, we are phenomenally complex. However, is there something else?

We Don’t Want to See

One answer is that we don’t want to see. We don’t want to see because we fear that if we actually look at who we are, we might not like who or what we see. It may confirm our deepest fears about who we are. It may affirm the presence of something we desperately hoped wasn’t there, or it may confirm the absence of something that we hoped was. It may convince us that we really don’t have the capacity to achieve the dreams that we want to achieve. It may corroborate all of the negative things that people have said we are, when we’ve spent our lives fighting against believing that that’s who we are. We may choose ‘ignorance’ as opposed to ‘knowing’ so that we can continue wearing the weathered façade that we’ve found comforting, in whatever way it might comfort us.

Or, looking at ourselves might actually confirm that we are better than what we thought ourselves to be, which will result in some sort of accountability that we don’t want to be accountable for. It may highlight rather formidable parts of ourselves that we haven’t cultivated, or personal resources that we’ve wasted in the wasting. It may reveal potential that has languished in the pit of ignorance, or giftings that have been left to rot in the sewers of apathy. It may call us up to places that we don’t believe we can go, leaving us greatly vexed by the contradiction of it all. So, we don’t want to see because seeing is just too painful, or too demanding, or too burdensome, or it comes weighted with too much guilt.

Becoming What They Want

Or, we’ve spent our energies not coming to understand who we are, but vesting those precious energies in becoming whoever it is that everyone says we should become. There are demanding social pressures to adhere to. Heavy-handed societal expectations that press us for compliance. There are those who are committed to whatever politically-correct agenda they’re committed to who are easily aroused and readily enflamed to rage should we refuse alignment with their agendas. There are the voguish trends that demand adherence lest we be labeled as outdated or just plain ignorant. There are the expectations of parents that rest heavy upon us, and the voices of well-meaning mentors that too often called us to some vision of who they thought we were. Therefore, we don’t have time to see ourselves because we’re spending our time trying to become another ‘self.’

Pressured to conformity by these elements, we develop this sectarian view of what we should be. We’ve collected this societal and relational collage that appears to be a perpetually changing montage of what we’re supposed to be. Somehow this becomes the standard template in place of ourselves being that standard. Over time, we are lulled into believing that the pursuit of this template is the truest pursuit of self, when it is nothing of the kind. And we become what we are not.

Being What Circumstances Made Us

It’s possible that we might have determined that it’s not who we are, but who circumstances made us to be. Abuse as a child. Bullying at the hands of thoughtless people bent on propping up their own fragile insecurities at our expense. Jobs lost in acquisitions that sacrificed employees on the cold altar of budget and profit. Marriages that collapsed at the hands of spouses who decided that the trade-off for personal agendas as held against the life of a marriage and a family was legitimate. Enemies that we mistook for friends who slowly circled around behind us and stabbed us in one of the many ways that people stab others. For us, these answer the question, “Who am I?”

The wounds, the disappointments, the betrayals, and the losses both large and small have defined us. In addition, the process of healing from the wounds inflicted, as well as angst involved in waiting for the ones that are yet to happen further define who we are. The embracing of an existence defined by what happened to us, further shaped by what we fear will happen becomes the sum total of who we are. Our lives become a tragically circular story of being wounded and then healing only to be wounded yet again. The difficult issue in being defined by our circumstances is that to understand how all of that has defined us means that we have to think about how all of that has defined us. And in our mind, the pain of doing that far, far offsets any potential self-discoveries. So we don’t think about them (or at least we try not to).

There’s Nothing to Discover

Or, we don’t feel that there’s any identity to discover. That somehow we are the embodiment of a bunch of ‘nothing’ that will only add up to nothing. That because there’s nothing there, the need for some sort of pursuit becomes unnecessary and embarrassingly ridiculous. We are what we already know, despite how little that might be. Somehow we ended up at the shallow end of the gene pool, or we showed up late when things were being handed out. We got to rummage through the left-overs or we were looked over. There was no motivation to develop anything along the way, or the opportunities to do so simply never came our way. Therefore, we don’t know who we are because we’re pretty much nothing and we already know that.

From nothing you can only get nothing. So we become embedded in a sense of hopelessness regarding both the present that we live in and the future that we have come to dread. The journey of self doesn’t exist because there’s nothing to journey from, and nothing to journey to. There’s a settling of sorts, where we fall into a sedentary malaise. And in this place where everything is nothing, our soul slowly stops breathing.

Other Reasons

Or could it be something entirely different? Could it be that we are vast beyond comprehension? That we’ve mistaken this journey of ‘who am I’ for a destination that gives us a clear and solid answer verses seeing it as a journey where the answer is always fleshing itself out with ever-great clarity as we go along? That we are someone who is perpetually in the process of becoming more of whoever that someone is? That we are not meant to be something that’s stagnant in time and space, but we are something that is always evolving in a manner that we are constantly advancing into time and growing in space? And to understand that is to begin to build a sense of self that will effectively begin to disassemble our negative sense of self.

All of this implies that we are, in fact, created vast beyond comprehension. And this personal vastness is so vast that it gifts us with resources that are beyond the years that we have to live out those resources. We are bigger than our own lifespan. Therefore, ‘who we are’ is based on ‘who we are in the becoming of who we are.’ Who we are is not defined by some sedentary event such as an alliance, or someone’s expectations of us, or the events that have befallen us. And unless we understand that, we will have missed the process of becoming who we are by looking for an answer in all the other things that can’t answer the question.

The Size of ‘Who I Am’

We have been gifted with a depth that will invite exploration and make space for such exploration for the entirety of our lives. We will never discover something about ourselves that will be that distinctly final discovery that concludes the journey. New vistas, fresh insights, and breathtakingly vast levels of awareness always await. We are entirely fluid, having each thing we learn expand upon everything that we learned before it, and subsequently enhancing everything that we’ve yet to learn. We grow geometrically, moving out in every direction at every moment in a continual cascade of growth. The end of who we are exists only as a figment of our sorely limited imaginations and is an outcome of the fear that maybe we are more than we’ve allowed ourselves to be.

What we do know is that we are the sum total of what we know about ourselves, plus the infinitely larger part that we don’t know. There will never be the final question. That every answer to every question is an invitation to the next question and the next one after that. We are people made of horizons and for horizons, and if perchance we live within walls, it is we who have created them. The question of “Who am I?” is not one question answered by one answer. It is a robust collection of questions that slowly but deliberately reveal the tantalizing picture of who we are. It is an adventure of the greatest sort. The hunt for treasure that captivates all of our imaginations. It is discovering the genius of God as that genius was manifest within us without any hesitation of any kind. Hence the question, “Who am I?”

This search itself blatantly evidences the fact that we are bigger than ourselves, for if we knew everything about ourselves a search would be unnecessary and the questions unprovoked. There is more to us than we know, and even though we live in union with ourselves every day we remain a mystery to ourselves. Despite our low self-esteem and incessant deprecation, the question of who we are evidences that there is more to us than we realize. And if we walk this search for self out, at some inherently deep level we know that ‘who we are’ is so vast that we will spend the entirety of our lives in search of it, yet we will never know all of it. And if the whole of us is beyond the whole of a lifetime to discover, how indescribably grand must we be? And maybe this is what should shape our self-esteem. This is how we should view ourselves. This is what fires our imagination and fuels our journey.

Seeking the Answer Verses Searching for Peace

The question then begs the search, which can be unsettling for many. The penetrating angst and unrelenting curiosity generated by the question of ‘who we are’ is the impetus that sends us searching for some sense of peace about who we are. This peace is not necessarily obtained by having some answer to the question of who we are. To our own demise, the frenzied search to calm our souls in this grand search often sends us into the ‘plug-and-play’ of a culture ready to give us the once-over and then plug us into whatever the once-over has determined us to be. It becomes something of a search for the defining box that our careers hand us, or the identifying label that our social circles have crafted for us, or the place that our socio-economic defines as ours, or the role that our family or friends have etched out for us.

There’s a myriad army of people and philosophies and social structures ready to dress-us-up and deck-us-out in the borrowed garments woven of their biases and stitched tight by their sordid agendas. Should it have its way, the world would abscond with us, embezzling our resources in the service of its agendas. And while all of these might give us an identity, that identity is borrowed or imposed or both. Suffice it to say, an identity either borrowed or imposed is a costume parading itself around as something it is not. At best, it may grant us a fragile and fraudulent peace that we gladly mistake for the real thing.

However, it lacks sustenance and stability. Typically, it’s constructed to fit a space suited for those who created it, rather than knock down the walls that have constricted us. It’s what fits them, but what enslaves us. Therefore, we have to repeatedly adjust it as we might, tear it down when we tire of it, build it back up when we’re scolded for tearing it down, and repeat the worn out narrative of why this is us and why it works…when it’s not and it doesn’t. Subsequently, the question goes unanswered because we don’t have the time to ask it.

Because it doesn’t work, our low self-esteem sits on forlorn hands and tells itself that the search is impossibly complex and that we would wise to relegate ourselves to some static existence of some sort. We are either nothing, or we are something that we are not, or we are all things bad built upon all things bad. We end up in one of these places because we’ve come at this defining question from every possible angle except the right one.

Within Not Without

As patently simplistic as it sounds, we are defined by who we are. We need not reach out to everything around us in order to define that which is within us. If we reach out to something or someone outside of us in this search for self, whatever or whoever we reach out to needs to walk us back inside of us because that’s where we are. It’s about being intelligently introspective in a manner that is intentional, thoughtful and relentless. It is about peeling away the sticky layers of culturally imposed norms, digging through the impregnable strata of our histories, breaking out of all of the superimposed roles, and rigorously erasing all of the rogue messages that others have penned across the tablet of our souls. And in the upheaval of a process that grand, it’s then formulating the right questions hoping that we’re actually daring enough to ask them.

In this rigorous process, it’s not about evaluating what we see as held against some clandestine societal rubric or chafing personal bias. Rather, it’s more about accepting what we see and asking how it can be shaped, honed, cultivated and nurtured. It’s about believing that we were created with all the essential elements to become the essential person that we were intentionally and rather ingeniously designed to be. It’s about understanding that there is a specific role out there somewhere that’s waiting for us to show up and that it’s probably sitting a whole lot closer to us than we think it is. And the best way that we can show up for that role is to come as we are and not as the world says we should come. It’s presenting ourselves before the God that created us, stepping into the life He set in front of us, and believing that it will unfold if we just show up for everything to unfold.

This is not about giving ourselves permission to spin off on some ill-defined quest of self-indulgence, for our true selves won’t find themselves shaped for that kind of agenda. This is not about permission to become absorbed in a self-satiating endeavor where we suddenly realize that life is ours for the taking when we’ve spent our lives having life take from us. Rather, it’s respecting our authenticity as being something that adds to life rather than adds to self. It’s about realizing that our true self will never detract from the true selves of those around us nor will it ever impinge upon them. And if perchance it does, it wasn’t ‘us’ to begin with.

You are uniquely designed with everything you need to be everything that you are. And that design is sufficient to be able to do everything that you were designed to do. It is big enough to exceed your lifetime. You may not see it, but as have noted, seeing something does not evidence its existence or lack thereof. It’s coming against the lies that have been spun about us, the identities that have been forced upon us, and breaking the box that other more fearful people have crafted for us. Despite the nature of your self-esteem and the darkness that it has layered ‘round about you, may the quest to discover all of this be relentless in it’s scope, potent in it’s process, and blessed throughout.