The Person I Am and The Person I Want To Be
As I began to think about creating my 30 at 30 list, I began coming up against the same recurring block: The Person I Am. I capitalise The Person I Am because it really does feel like a proper noun; a thing that exists that has a bearing upon me that doesn’t always feel under my control. It is within me, but also independent of me, telling me what I can and can’t do regardless of what I actually think about the matter.
The Person I Am was an identity I’d taken on but hadn’t been an active participant in creating. It was a set of beliefs and expectations forged from conditioning and assumptions that moulded easily to my natural predisposition and which I had never questioned – it was just who I was. This was a person whose worthiness depended on being good at things, and if she couldn’t be immediately good at something she wouldn’t try it. This was a person that wouldn’t do things just because she wanted to because that was selfish. This was a person who knew her place and that certain things were just out of limits for her – fine for other people to do but not “people like me”.
The Person I Am had me living a quite static existence. I stayed safely still within the fences of my field; within the fences of everything I could do without considering the possibility of trying anything that lay outside them. I remember being down on the ground and looking up and at the mountains wondering what it was like up there, without it ever occurring to me that I could just go and find out. That kind of thing was for other people, not people like me – for me they were to look at, not to try and climb. Anything that I thought “that looks fun” or “I’d like to try that” was easily dismissed because it didn’t align with The Person I Am.
But then I grew too big for the field, and The Person I Am was no longer keeping me comfortably safe but squeezing me tightly, cutting off the circulation. For years I’d never questioned The Person I Am but as I found myself looking out from a mountain top I’d never considered climbing, I began to wonder “what else might not be true?”.
Perhaps The Person I Am didn’t have to be a static enclosure, but it could run free beside me. Perhaps if I tried things and wasn’t good at them the world wouldn’t end, and the worst case scenario would be that I’d have a day out doing something different. Perhaps if I asked for and did what I want I would just…have what I want, without it having some negative bearing on my character. Perhaps nothing is off limits for me – perhaps if I prepare and commit, there’s nothing I can’t do.
Writing the list was a cathartic process of daring myself to dream bigger and harder. At first The Person I Am squirmed and worried and said “oh no, we could never!”, but quickly their voice got quieter and quieter as I got higher and higher on possibility. Because I’d decided I was allowed to try, suddenly the world seemed more colourful and I felt more in it.
Which is not to say it’s been easy in practice. Last week I did the first thing from the list and had the rock climbing session my friends had bought me for my birthday. Unbeknownst to me, The Person I Am came too, showing up in the discomfort the first moment I didn’t know where to put my feet, and when more proficient climbers came close enough to realise I was having a lesson and was not, in fact, a superstar professional climber. This way of being, though, is a habit. Everyone else was thinking about their own climbs, and so I thought about my own climb. I focused on being present and concentrating on rock and rope, leaning in heavily to the many many moments of “I’m really doing this”.
I was going to close out this post talking about leaving The Person I Am behind forever and being free from expectation – but something has changed.
When I first took Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies quiz, I was an Obliger – someone who was mostly externally motivated and therefore needed lots of accountability from others to make things happen. However, on group calls with the Trail members recently I’ve found myself relating more and more to the Rebels in the group, and sure enough, on re-taking the test last week, I am now a Rebel – Rubin’s tagline for which is “you can’t make me, and neither can I”.
Over the last couple of months my motivation, energy and enthusiasm for work, and really doing anything has dropped off a cliff, and it makes sense that my archetype has shifted and I now have no tools to make myself to do stuff. It has been all too easy to stare at my phone for 6 hours a day and move self-imposed deadlines and generally drift – but that isn’t feeling particularly good. I want to get going again, I just don’t know how to make myself.
Reading up on the Rebel archetype, Rubin’s Strategy of Identity immediately feels familiar – Rebels can do things when it helps them be the person they want to be. I already see this happening naturally in my behaviour: I exercise every day because I want to be a person who exercises every day, I follow up with friends because I want to be a person who does what she says she’s going to do. And so, rather than burying The Person I Am and blowing on the wind, I am now thinking about bringing in The Person I Want To Be.
The Person I Want To Be is different to The Person I Am. First of all, I am creating The Person I Want To Be – it is based very consciously on my dreams and values, and on the most positive aspects I want to embody rather than the most negative possibilities. The Person I Want To Be is about helping me to grow, rather than keeping me in my place. The Person I Want To Be is an anchor point and spring board to make me keep living, rather than a safe room that just keeps me alive.
