27 - Will the Real You Please Stand Up?

TRANSCRIPT

 

Thanks for joining us today on Like Driving in Fog: an emotional healing podcast. I’m Mary Young, and today were talking about who are you really. Or as I was thinking this morning, going back to an old, old quiz show from the 50s and early 60s: will the real you please stand up?

We are born with a personality. You can ask any parent of babies or small children, and they will tell: you this baby was different from that baby from the get-go. That essence of who we are stays with us for entire life, but life circumstances, family upbringing, other people’s expectations can impact how much of that inner essence we actually share. This feels really complicated the way that I’m saying it, but it’s really not. I’m just not finding the right words so let me try a different way.

There’s a Facebook meme going around that has a picture of a coffee cup, and the meme talks about if you’re holding a cup of coffee and somebody bumps into you and you spill it, what do you spill? Well, you spill coffee because that’s what’s in the cup. So turning that into human beings instead of cups of coffee...when something happens to you and you react, you react based on what you have inside you.

And the reason I’m thinking about all this today is because yesterday I went to a service described as a Celebration of Life for a 15-year-old young man who lost his life right before Christmas. I talked about that in my Christmas episodes actually: Sometimes There Are No Answers, and There’s Always Hope. At the same time that I was preparing to go to Reed’s Celebration of Life, my Facebook memories popped up a meme from a couple years ago with a quote from Buddha. And the quote said the trouble is we think we have time.

We don’t have time.

We are not promised anything other than the moment that we are currently living in. we don’t know that we will be here tomorrow, or an hour from now. And yet, we spend a large part of our life trying to be what somebody else wants us to be, or what somebody else has dictated we should be. This works in a lot of different areas...think about people who go to college. Mom and dad are paying for the education, so they get a degree that mom and dad want them to have, even if it’s not what they want to do with their life.

We need to stop letting other people define us.

We need to define ourselves.

It’s not easy, because we have been conditioned to let other people define us. We have been conditioned to believe that that’s who we are.

• I’m the youngest.
• I’m scatterbrained.
• I’m lazy.
• I suck at math.
• I don’t have street smarts, I only have book smarts.

Most of what I just said to you is stuff that has been said to me over the course of my life, especially over my childhood. Some of this is not a big deal, but some of this is huge.

My question for you is who are you really?

• Will the real you please stand up?
• What does the real you look like?
• Who are you?
• What matters to you?
• What are your likes and dislikes?
• What are your strengths and weaknesses?
• How much of your current description of yourself was given to you by somebody else?
• Does it actually fit your reality today?

Part of the reason that this is on my mind is because at Reed’s service yesterday, his family was sharing memories. And for only being 15 years old, they had a lot of memories to share. But what came through over and over and over again was his absolute zest for life; his joy in living; his bigger than his face smile. And I couldn’t help thinking what a wonderful way to be remembered. When his family thinks about him for the next 30 years, they’re going to remember that he was always smiling, he was always helping, he was always joyful, that he loved life and he loved people, and he loved making a difference in people’s lives.

Guys, this is a great way to be remembered, I don’t care how old you are. years ago, I asked myself how do I want to be remembered, and once I had that answer, then the next question was what do I have to do to make sure that that’s how I’m remembered? And it comes back to: who are you really?

If you’re holding a cup of coffee and somebody bumps into you, what gets spilled out? I want to be remembered as somebody who lives love. As somebody who cares about other people. As somebody who does not put people down, but instead builds people up. But I can tell you truly: 20 years ago I don’t think that’s how I would’ve been remembered. I am a work in progress.

We are all works in progress.

So I’m challenging you:  who are you really? And are you letting that shine, or are you burying that under the layers of everything that people have put on you over the years? When I first went to therapy 20 years ago, one of the things that Tricia, my Texas therapist, had me do was make a list of everything that defined me. So that was my homework one week. I went away and I worked on it, and I came back to her with three or four pages of how do I define myself. And it was things like:

• I’m lazy
• I read too much
• I don’t do housework
• I’m scatterbrained
• I’m too technical

And those were all messages that I had been given when I was growing up.

Tricia had me read that list out loud to her, and then we went back and looked at each item one at a time, and I had to decide or identify where did that come from. Was that something I say about myself, or was that something that somebody else said about me? 75%, maybe 85% of that list was things that other people -- specifically my family -- had said about me. Once we had identified that. Then Tricia said okay, now let’s take each one of those and let’s find what’s really true about them.

I’m lazy is my favorite one, because I still fight that in my brain, because I am not constantly doing things all day long. I will sit and play on my computer. I will sit and read a book, and to my family of origin that meant that I was lazy because I wasn’t cleaning house, when the house needed cleaned, I was reading a book.

Working with Tricia, I changed that phrase from I’m lazy to I choose to do other things with my time. For people who have different priorities, they don’t always know how to describe that and so they say well obviously you’re lazy. Because you’re not doing what I think is important. Well, no! Because I’m not you. I’m doing what’s important to me.

last week, I challenged you to spend some time taking an inventory of yourself, to do  an annual am I going where I want to go, am I being who I want to be. This could be part of that. Just sit down and think about how you describe yourself, and decide how much of that is your own description of you, and how much of that was dictated to you by other people. Or how much of that was you becoming a chameleon so that you could fit in, or so that you would be loved.

You don’t have to be a chameleon to fit in or to be loved, and it took me 40 years to internalize that. I was a fantastic chameleon. Now I’m just me. And if people like me, that’s wonderful. And if they don’t, that’s not on me. That’s on them. But I am who I am, and I’m not going to change that for anybody. But I started that, by first identifying who I really am. Not who somebody else thinks I am. That’s the first step.

Let the real you stand up. Figure out who you really are, and let that person shine. Because I promise you:  the real you is way better than any disguise you’ve been wearing trying to fit in.

Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next week, and until then -- make it a great week.