Disillusioned or dissolution? I contemplated this as I sat listening to a PSCS senior state her credo (a statement of beliefs). Through examples of low self-esteem and grounded faith in her inner spirit, she closed with the remark, "I believe in me." This set me off considering what after all these years of considering what it means to be myself, I have come to believe about being myself.
I find myself adventurous, exploring all the time. When I am with people, I am lost in being with who they are. As a kid, if I spoke to someone with a different accent, in 20 minutes, I would have picked up their accent. In another 20 minutes, their mannerisms and in another 20 ....
I lose my being in my experiences. I think this needs to be one way in which one defines being oneself. I believe that the ego, the sense of self that most of us understand it to be is an illusion. The ego is a collection of thoughts, ideas and experiences from the past. A deeper inner spirit and force of life underlies it. Rarely do any of us find this inner spirit and give expression to it. Losing one's ego in experiences is a way of giving expression to the inner spirit.
In this vain, I think being oneself is less about identifying and defining an ego-based identity but more about letting go about an idea of who one is and instead losing oneself completely in the moments of an experience. The true expression of one's deep inner spirit can come through then, in ways one cannot identify, name or explain.
That I think is a way of being yourself.
All these years, I have been trying to define an identity when really there is nothing to define. Instead, there is only dissolution. There is just a way to be, to be oneself by not hanging on to an idea, an identity, an image.
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