Now I Become Myself

It’s not a hero’s journey; it’s a pilgrimage

Now I become myself. It's taken

Time, many years and places;

I have been dissolved and shaken,

Worn other people's faces,

Run madly, as if Time were there,

Terribly old, crying a warning,

"Hurry, you will be dead before—"

(What? Before you reach the morning?)

~MaySarton

In this singularly passionate poem, May Sarton writes for all of us. Wearing other people’s faces. Conforming to social norms. Trying too hard to belong without every really belonging. Confusing fitting in with belonging. Trimming our edges—all those quirks, beliefs, dreams that make us unique—to be accepted by an amorphous ‘they’. As we go about this world carrying the weight of armors accumulated over years and decades, we lose ourselves. In the many guises we put forth, ‘who am I’ cries a quiet, desolate, often desperate voice within. The voice goes unheard.

Designations, roles, social constructs become our identities. When I left my corporate job and my designation behind, I divested myself of one armor. It took me a long time to realize that I had been hiding behind it. We hide behind so many masks and armors that eventually we become invisible to ourselves.

Wholeness, authenticity, vulnerability, bringing one’s whole self to work are all becoming the vogue today. The question is, do we know who we are? Who am I behind all the masks? What remains if my social roles, designations, tasks are no longer my props? Have we become straw beings created from bits and pieces of cultural narratives and concepts? What does my wholeness look like, feel like, behave like? It’s a journey of rediscovery.

The constructs are imposed on us by a social order that operates from a few paradigms: coercion, guilt, shaming, rewards, punishments. When we have traversed half-way through our lives wearing other people’s faces do some of us wake up to our own incoherence. The incoherence within becomes the incoherence without.    

Is it any wonder that we have created a civilizational narrative that glorifies extraction, exploitation, expropriation in the name of profit? Where violence and victory go hand-in-hand. Where the ‘selfish individual grasping for ever more’ is the best we could imagine for our one glorious human life. Where a smart phone is deemed important enough to ravage the earth and its inhabitants. Where imagination, creativity, and joy, are sacrificed at the altar of hard logic, conformity, and control. And then we wonder, with all our technological marvels and promises of more to come, why does life feel so grueling, dreary, and just not quite right.

All those productivity apps and labor-saving devices should have gotten us hours of leisure. Where are those invisible hours? Who is stealing our precious time on this planet?

When we finally step back from our scripted roles in this drama, refusing to play our part, and finally re-read that script that has been running the show, it’s like waking up from a deep slumber. Or perhaps from a drugged state. Then is the time to reimagine a new script. A script where the ‘selfish individual’ is replaced by a ‘collaborative human’, where the human is not the apex species but one of many astonishingly beautiful lives inhabiting this blue, floating, dream of a planet. Where our consciousness gives us the capability to be stewards of this stunning orb. Unfortunately, we are caught up in a vicious, obsolete script. It’s time to wake up from the nightmare.

The old script has one fundamental purpose—to instill fear. Fear of all kinds. Of missing quarterly targets, of falling stock prices, of shareholders’ belligerence, of competition, of losing that billionaire status. And then real fears, existential ones for our very survival. Of lack of food, of homelessness, of losing that last tenuous means of income, of being evicted from one’s rightful land, of … the list is endless. How did we end up here? What must we do to reimagine a new script?

It begins with rejecting the current script. Keeping an eye out for all its insidious manifestations. But more importantly, the collective task before us is to reinvent and rewrite the script for a new cultural and civilizational narrative. One that is life-affirming. One that glorifies beauty, dignity, grace, joy, love.    

It will be a pilgrim’s journey filled with perils. It will require us to abandon our old shoes as the poet David Whyte so eloquently said in Finisterre:

The road in the end taking the path the sun had taken,

into the western sea, and the moon rising behind you

as you stood where ground turned to ocean: no way

to your future now but the way your shadow could take,

walking before you across water, going where shadows go,

no way to make sense of a world that wouldn’t let you pass

except to call an end to the way you had come,

…

and to abandon the shoes that had brought you here

right at the water’s edge, not because you had given up

but because now, you would find a different way to tread,

and because, through it all, part of you would still walk on,

no matter how, over the waves.