I'm up to my eyeballs.

An identity crisis. That's an interesting concept.

I'm beginning to think that it's the people who believe they know exactly who they are that are really in a crisis. Like those people who believe they know everything about God (what an idea!) from how the earth came to be to how these things called "the fall" and "reconciliation" work. Those people make me nervous. I don't mean to otherize. What I mean to say is that I believe there's something healthy about thinking about one's belief system as a lens through which to see the world, rather than real answers to questions that we just can't know. It's like building a skyscraper with a bit of give, so that when an earthquake strikes, it doesn't crumble like my gingerbread houses always do.

But this is mostly besides the point. I'd just like to apply this same principal to knowing oneself. It seems to me that as long as my life is not static, I'll never stop getting to know myself. And even if I experience something and then experience it again five years later, I'll be a different person who responds differently. To be honest, it's exhausting, but I suppose it's better that finding myself and my life boring.

This all comes to mind as I've been working on this self-employment project over the past several months. It's forced me to develop skills that I never wanted to develop before because it would have required leaving my comfort zone. Risking rejection, risking failure, speaking with confidence to skeptical people, sales, relying on others, asking for things - these are all things that I avoided before, but now, I've been slowly wading into a pool of them. At this point, I'm up to my eyeballs, but I'm learning to swim, so that's good.


This post was written, very tardily, as a part of a blogging game. The players are The Creative Collective and the topic is Identity Crisis. See what the others are saying.