Don't lose more than you fight to protect
It is easy to want to be things. I want to be good at sports. I want to be a tidy person. It’s a lot harder to actually be something. Because we are what we do. No matter how unfair and outside of our own control, we can’t be the loving father if we don’t spend time with the child. This blogpost is about choosing what not to be so that we can dedicate our time to what you do want to be. It's not the usual RPG stuff, but it is about making time for other things which are more important, which is why I haven't done much in the RPG sphere lately. And hey, I'm still figuring out what this blog is about as I go!
There is an infinity of things to be
The difference between what you want to be and what you are can grow bigger and bigger, and you can start feeling the strain as the distance between the two stretches further and further. You can feel disjoint, you can feel like an impostor. Why do we want to be so much, even when we don’t act to realize any of it?
Identities don’t drop out of thin air. At least not for me. I am surrounded by a community of people who have dreams for me. Parents want us to be good children. Teachers want us to be good students. Naturally when these people matter to us, we will want to be a good child and we want to be a good student. The list goes on: a good friend, a good employee, a good parent, a good colleague. We adopt the expectations that our trusted community imprints on us, and small actions towards actualising these start feeling very rewarding. But that doesn’t mean that we can keep juggling all of them.
The more we gain, the more we stand to lose
There is seemingly no limit to the things we can want to be. Each day we can add new identities to our wish list. We can try them out, see how they suit us, sense a bit of reward when we do a minor thing that lives up to them, and as we do, the identities start growing on us. We become attached to them and get a sense of ownership. Even if we never fully actualized any of them, we can start feeling like this has always been who we were meant to be.
It hurts like hell to lose something we considered ours. This is especially true for identities, because they are a matter of survival. Survival can be about more than just the survival of your body. It can be about the survival of your mind, the survival of your heart, it can be about the survival of your soul, and each of its tiny parts. Once an identity has become a part of who you are, losing it means losing a part of yourself, and your survival instinct won’t allow that. Without realizing it, your wish list of identities has plunged you into a war of survival. And in a war, there are always casualties.
Cut your losses
Here’s what I learned: it is better to lose and mourn an identity early, than to start a war over it and lose something much more important in the process. This is what people mean when they say “get your priorities straight”. It’s hard to do that when everything feels like a matter of identity survival. Only once one of these 'important' things have been cut off, and you have had the time to mourn its loss, will you be able to tell if it was really as important as you thought it was.
What identity is the most important one to you? For me, it is ‘dad’. In the scorching light of that single identity, I have taken a magnifying glass and looked at all others I hold dear. The son, the husband, the friend, the citizen, the creative, to name a few from the top of my head. I have made my peace with a life-changing resolution: at the drop of a hat, I will burn anything else that I am, just to be called ‘dad’. There has been nothing more liberating in my life. It's interesting how identities work. It was never my dream to be a dad; I was simply open to it. And now that I am, it has grown into the strongest identity I have ever had. It helped me realize that I can drop the vast majority of who I am, and it will hurt, but the ‘I’ will remain. That doesn't mean I have to let everything go, but rather; I now know that I can.
The road ahead is long and winding
Don’t wait to act towards who you want to be. If you think the road might be difficult but essentially a straight, upward path towards a fixed goal, you might be like me, just before I was in for a surprise. We all start our journey in a valley from which we can only see our first hilltop. Beyond that, the road can have many branches, many ups and downs, and with each new height we reach, what we see next may change our destination completely. I never saw myself as a dad, it was just a welcome possibility. But I reached that hilltop and saw that the identities I held as destinations now just became my travel companions: they were welcome to tag along, but it’s fine if at some point we go our separate ways. Maybe we'll meet eachother on the road again, but it's ok to let go.
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