Embracing the Uncomfortable Search for Our True Selves
By: Vika Nunez
I’ve always been told that our young adult years are for discovering oneself. The process of leaving home and living on our own gives us the perfect opportunity to peer into ourselves from a semi-detached state. We’re like explorers finding desert islands with our names on it.
There’s a scene from the movie Reality Bites that speaks to this. After a climactic setback, one of the main characters, Lelaina Pierce, says, “I was really gonna be something by the age of twenty-three.” Her boyfriend answers her, “Honey, all you have to be by the age of twenty-three is yourself.” She responds, “I don’t know who that is anymore.”
I’ve often felt like Lelaina, peering at my own little island, unsure of what exactly I was looking at. But those moments of unfamiliarity opened up uncomfortable questions about my family of origin, my embodied self, and my purpose in life. And so, as frustrating as these open-ended and never-fully-answered questions can be, I have learned to embrace them, like Peter Pan trying to be united to his shadow. Every Reality Bites moment can be the beginning of a deeper search for integrity between our internal views of ourselves and how we exist in the world, especially in light of the roles we play, our understanding of our bodies, and how we frame our expectations of the future.
The Roles We Play
We all know how family dynamics impact our understanding of our own identities. You may even already have noticed how being at college presents some of the first opportunities to truly differentiate ourselves from our families of origin in a healthy way. You may find yourself making decisions that either dovetail with your families’ beliefs or take a step in a different direction. What then, do these decisions say about you?
For example, maybe you grew up with a certain role or expectation in your family. At college, you may find yourself being pulled into situations that look like that role again. You begin to wonder why you keep getting involved in these situations. Let’s say that after talking with trusted friends and maybe even a counselor, you decide to set some healthy boundaries and you discover parts of you that have room to grow as a result. You realize you do not need to play a certain role to reassure you of your true self.
However, upon returning home to your family over Christmas break, a conflict arises and you feel compelled to return to your old role again. If you refuse to conform to this expectation, it may confuse your family. Some members may even be angry at the space that you leave as a result. It is at this moment that your identity will be once again called into question. Who will you choose to be?
Cultivating your true self is a worthy endeavor that takes a lot of bravery. I’ve found this process of differentiation to be one of the most crucial steps to living into the freedom we have in Christ. In a conversation on this topic with my priest, I learned that part of honoring our fathers and mothers comes with naming the good and the bad we’ve inherited while at the same time leaving behind unhealthy patterns. What freedom I experience when I realize I am only called to live my story! Not anyone else’s! Pete Scazzero touches on this in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality with the following Rabbi Zusya quote: “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
Our Own Body Politic
Because you’re at Hillsdale, I assume you’re all brilliant, dedicated, and very clever. But, as women at the whims of their cycles, you may have realized how Plato’s disembodied philosophy of self can only take you so far. As we live the grave yet beautiful responsibility of being a woman, our own relationships with our bodies are often accompanied by a tension between embodiment and detachment.
Perhaps many of you grew up as I did, where women’s bodies were encouraged to be hidden, yet constantly scrutinized. Perhaps you grew up doing a certain sport or activity that required too much of your body and you had to quit. In these scenarios, dissociation from our bodies were ways we tried to protect ourselves from the shame or pain we experienced. And as a result, we created neural habits of turning to disembodiment when we encounter those feelings again.
The Platonic idea of our bodies as containers for our souls has an uncanny way of affirming this unhealthiness. In contrast, the Ancient Hebrew understanding of our souls and our bodies was much more holistic and interconnected, where body and soul were harder to tell apart. As such, their traditions focused on intentional nourishment and care of their bodies-and-souls.
With this in mind, can you bear to bless your body with the love of a Creator who is not ashamed of you, who doesn’t view your body as just “something your husband can enjoy someday” or a mere physical means to an end. Can you learn to appreciate your body as something God delighted in designing? This process of inviting God’s eye to our view of our bodies can create new pathways in our minds. Instead of swinging between scrupulosity towards my body or borderline negligence, I must choose to patiently embrace the messy middle, the already-not-yet.
Are We What We Do?
Many of you might be on the cusp of graduation. When I was finishing my last semester, I had the recurring thought of anticipation: “Now my life will begin!” Almost two years later, I’ve learned that every life event is not guaranteed and neither is the sense of self we think a certain life event will grant us. In the words of the wise Jenny Pridgeon at the first Curate conference I attended, certain life events that we long for — a home, marriage, children, and so on — are not a reward for being a good person.
Take motherhood, for example. I’ve been surrounded by moms my entire life and I love to hear their stories. In the great sisterhood of women, I often view them as the women who have “made it.” They’ve got the kids, the Costco membership, the wreath on the front door. But I’ve started to notice the young moms who feel overwhelmed and distanced from a self they used to understand. I’ve observed the mothers struggling to adjust to not being needed as much as their kids graduate high school. The questions I’ve heard sound eerily similar to my own right now, “Who am I apart from this body, this role?” What do you mean who are you, I want to say, you’re a mom! But there’s something deeper in me that knows exactly what they’re talking about.
My own underlying insecurities and bad habits didn’t just go away once I was at a great school, loved my major, and had kind friends. Though I felt like my true self was recognized and encouraged at Hillsdale in ways I didn’t realize I had been waiting for, I still had months of disorienting doubts about who I was. Every party was a chance to shake hands with my social anxiety, and the stress of the high-achievement culture wreaked havoc on my physical health. Even after graduating and being in a far healthier lifestyle, I’m learning that if I do not take the time to find out what in me needs to be watered, cultivated, and pruned, I’m never going to be okay with myself. What are you waiting for to feel peace with yourself? What would it take to figure it out?
How Shall We Then Live
In Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, Pete Scazzero says, “The vast majority of us go to our graves without knowing who we are. Without being fully aware of it, we live someone else’s life, or at least someone else’s expectations for us. This does violence to ourselves, to our relationship with God, and ultimately to others.” This quote gets at the idea of integrity: when we live disconnected from our true selves, it’s not fair to those we are in relationship with and it’s not fair to ourselves. You might even consider it a sin of omission: “forgive us for what we have left undone.”
Even though events like vocation, marriage, and children can help you explore and expand new ways that you can be you, it doesn’t change the fact that those questions will hang around, waiting for you to answer them. Every new life event may expose an old insecurity, but I believe it carries an invitation for you to map out the geography of your island a little more accurately.
Spending time with the hard questions is a battle for integrity. What would it look like if you knew yourself so well that your inner identity matched with your outer identity? No disembodiment. No circumstantial role-playing. No enmeshment. Just a return to the work of your Creator in you. Perhaps the only thing you have to be right now is yourself.
