Who Are You… and Are You Sure?

“Our concern must be to live while we’re alive…. to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a façade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.” – Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

I grew up as a Foreign Service brat. In case you don’t know what that is, that’s the child of a State Department employee who’s stationed in foreign countries.

People always tell me how lucky I was to have had the opportunity to grow up in foreign countries and be exposed to other cultures and learn other languages. And they are completely correct about that. In so many ways it was a tremendous privilege and a blessing to do just that.

But for me, there was a downside. State Department assignments typically last only two or three years, rarely longer. When you move every few years as a child, you repeatedly lose your friends, your neighborhood, your school, your entire environment.

So I was achingly lonely as a child. On the one hand, there was a reluctance to form close relationships because they were inherently short lived – I knew there was always a loss coming. On the other hand, whenever we arrived at a new assignment, I desperately wanted to fit in right away. Anything to not be “the New Kid” for one second longer than I had to be.

You also lose the local culture, meaning not just the culture of the country, but as a child, you lose the local “kid” culture. The New Kid doesn’t know what’s cool now, and the New Kid learns that what was cool in the old place is definitely not in the new place, and even the slang is different.

So I learned how to fit in fast. In other words, I became very good at picking up external cues about who I was supposed to be. What I became lousy at was the ability to hear my own internal voice for very long. I sure couldn’t trust it, because if I listened to that voice, it generally led to the pain of rejection.

And like the Kubler-Ross quote, it became a way of life that was a spiritual living death. I spent pretty much my entire adult life and career trying to conform to what I believed to be the external definitions of who I was supposed to be, whether they were the definitions of my peers, my parents, my wife, my boss, church, whatever.

Notice that these weren’t necessarily others’ actual expectations, just what I perceived them to be. If you think this is a confusing way to live, you’re right. Confusing and frustrating and maddening.

The good news is that I gradually learned to hear my own voice. Just a little at a time at first, then more clearly, until finally, at the age when most people are nearly ready to retire, I finally have gotten clarity on just who I am and what I’m really about. I learned how to distinguish that voice, what the feelings were that accompanied it, and what the feelings were that accompanied the voices of external expectations.

Once that happened, I was able to add a major component to the counseling I had been doing for years. I discovered that a lot of people shared the same inability to hear their own voice and know who they were, though everyone got there by a different route. I don’t run across many fellow Foreign Service brats, but I do meet a lot of people who are struggling with the same basic dynamic.

Until you’re able to really hear your inner voice and line up your life with who you uniquely are, you will be under an unhealthy stress load that is so constant that you may not even be aware of it, because it’s just there, part of the background noise of life.

I had to discover it on my own, and it took me too many years. Don’t wait until you’re ready to retire to discover who you are.

And that’s today’s holistic health tip.

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