Picture by Mel Poole on UnSplash
Did you send the report?
I connected with a colleague over a pretty mundane issue – did I send her the report? Did she receive it? I went to the place of assuming I had thought about sending it but didn’t actually do it. This happens. It happens more right now as I live with my shifting hormonal, menopausal self.
I have developed within myself a sense of competence in certain areas of my life. In this mid-stage of life, that sense of competence is tinged with a few dollops of chaos, a kind of disorderly reality – the strategies I have used to stay organized, that help me feel on top of everything are no longer working in the way they used to.
In my email conversation with my colleague, this truth popped out of somewhere – I am coming to know this inner stranger, the part of me that can be in tears one moment, touched deeply by a story and sometimes adrift in feeling, my long years of honing my attention, focus on a task somehow coming undone. In the way that what I thought I did (send the report) and what I did (leave it in my draft folder) are increasingly not the same; what I think about myself and how I show up are not the same. Part of me is paying attention to something else.
Of course, there are gaps in who I say I am and who I actually am – this is the work of life to know ourselves past the stories we tell about ourselves. It’s the surprise that is unsettling – the surprise of how I show up, after 5 decades of getting to know myself well.
At the risk of jumping too deeply into the existential end of the pool, how do I define myself?
In the respect of competence in my work, in this area of consulting, I have an earned confidence in my competence – I trust in it. I know my strengths, understand my weaknesses, how to live from a place of self-acceptance that my 25-year-old self craved.
It is easy to blame the hormonal changes as the villain, seeing other changes happen in my body and just hope this villain will eventually just go away. We want what brings us certainty in this most basic part of ourselves – our identity.
I am being me. And that is changing – the current impact of my aging process. And there are moments, nearly every week, when I don’t really know who I am right now. Breaking apart of my sense of self.
I am being and I am becoming.
This is where certainty doesn’t serve the way it used to. I used to use certainty as a way to keep the chaos of the world at bay. Now the ground that my earned competence allows for is to see more clearly that chaos is truly part of my world, part of myself.
This week’s quote from Dennis Leri, a Feldenkrais elder, enfolded my experience of my inner stranger.
What is could be different. What is different could be me.
If our identity is a story, what if in addition to a personal memoir of all the ways I’ve been before, my identity is also a mystery, a personal “who-did-that?” thriller? Except no crime has been committed. Just being – living into my next chapter.
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