QUESTION OF SELF
The past few years have brought social networking sites to the forefront of online life. I heard it said you could find old friends through sites like Myspace and Facebook, and so first I joined one, then another. The advantage to a networking site is that you have immediate access to people in your social network that have drifted out of your geological zone, and whom you don't casually run into anymore and have the chance to catch up with each other's lives.
It is in renewed contact with people from different times in our lives that we can see ourselves in comparison with where we used to be. It is where the past catches up to the present.
I find it very interesting from a psychological perspective the unique connection that brings, and how those comparisons play out. For instance, I have noticed that with our world growing larger, we find more in common with those in our immediate world. We have access to millions of people, and so the fact that this person was not in your clique in school doesn't seem to matter anymore when you consider they grew up in your neighborhood and went to all the same schools as you, and therefore has a common ground of experiences with you that most people don't.
It can also illuminate how different you might have become. Lately, I have been considering this idea that an old friend threw at my Facebook page. She questioned if I was having a midlife crisis, based on the things she saw on my profile.
My profile reads basically the same as my info on this site. To me, this is just the same old stuff I have always been into, which is why I think about her comment so much.
Am I supposed to have changed? Have we just changed so much that I seem different to her, or did she just never really know me? Have I changed? Or has she?
I have always been committed to preserving my identity. This commitment to being true to my self started when I was in high school and had some experiences that I had to make it through. I did some soul searching and inner self reconstruction in order to come out better on the other side, and when I finished, I saw who I was and vowed to keep that person intact.
When I became a mother, I saw myself and the women friends I knew with kids the same age lose parts of ourselves to become mothers and wives. I noticed that my experience was a common one with the women I knew, in that the first three years of their children's lives, the mother's life completely revolves around mommyhood. We don't have time for hobbies between holding our babies and keeping our house.
When I was in that stage, most of my reading was Parenting magazines and baby care books. I would list as my hobbies "cooking and cleaning". Changing diapers and making bottles came before reading and exercising, and when you did have time for yourself, you were too tired to do anything with it.
...But in those days, I still had my horse, my dog, my journals, and my Kerouac, my "pop philosophy and psychology", an interest in the esoteric, the reading, the walking, riding, and writing, and my dog Rascal, for the love of I went to work every day...
When I finally woke up one day, washed the baby drool off my shirt and re-entered the land of the living, I realized I had lost some of my essence, and that essence remained vital to my sense of fulfillment in my life.
Some of my friends never made a clean break. Some lost themselves and their identity to motherhood, and that is all that they are now. These are people like the mommybloggers and soccer moms of the world. I didn't want to be like them. I thought I was a pretty hip chick and I wanted to stay that way. I missed the way they used to be, and I didn't want to wake up one day and feel that way about myself.
When I had my second baby, I fought to keep my sense of self. I did something every day with my children, or maybe alone when my husband was home, to keep myself feeling like me.
I spend lots of time in introspection and self assessment, so I have always felt like I had a really good sense of who I was. The problem we run into with introspection, though, is that who you think you are is really only half of the picture. It doesn't matter what we think of ourselves when viewed through someone else's eyes.
Perception is reality. If someone percieves me one way, then I do exist in that way, to them, and no amount of disagreement on my part changes their reality of who I am.
Who are we, then? How do we really know what people think of us? They never come right out and tell us exactly everything they think of us. The only way we can tell is by reading into the clues that they leave in the things they say.
For instance, I have some clues on what others think of me lately.
Out at the piano bar, "Indy" introduces me to his girlfriend with "she's a really good writer, and she shows dogs..." she was so sweet - "And very pretty...!" she said, and I to her....at church, my old friend introduces me to the minister with, "and she's probably the deepest person you'll ever meet.." and the small group study circles all nods in affirmation, murmuring "she's really deep..." and my geocaching girl friend telling me she was surprised with how much I read, and says it probably explains why I am a good writer....my husband doesn't want to tell me something because I "have no compassion" and my best friend scoffs and says he must not know me, then, because you know that's true...
Compassion, the force that drives me to my life direction. I am still the girl who made a vow to her childhood dog to take a stand for animals, after finding the dog being kicked by boys and unable to get away because I had tied her up....a loyalty to a dog that became the collective "Dog" and the collective "Animals". I am still the same girl who later calmed an outlaw horse and made him hers, the same who could touch the male bongo that no one else could touch, and got to name his fall baby. The same one who held dying dogs in her arms in animal shelters, and dedicating herself to animal health care, and shelter dogs, and stress in captivity in general.
"She was overexposed to animal euthanasia," one doctor wrote about me in a letter of recommendation, and so I was injected with passion to preserve the human-animal bond through education and training, a teacher of Puppy Kindergarten with twenty people and ten dogs bouncing around the clinic waiting room.
An old friend sees me the same way as ever, she says, "warm, kind, intelligent, beautiful" and I to her, another sees me as "creative"...and a contemporary friend who remembers me as being really into geocaching...."a true friend, which is a rare thing these days," says an ex...
The thing is, I built this thing, this person in here, with the help of God. God had a plan for me, and I feel fortunate that it was revealed to me early on. I have certain talents, or gifts, like compassion, empathy, and the ability to focus on something intently for a long period of time. I felt strongly that he wanted me to make the world a better place for animals and equipped me with the ability to do so. This has been "me" since around eight years old, this core belief that provides me direction.
Curiosity, the force that drives me to seek adventures and knowledge. I have always been a seeker. I want to know the answers and go to the places and experience everything, which made me open to many different impulses and places. I want to learn, to study, to ask questions. I want to taste all the food and meet different kinds of people. In my younger and wilder days, this spirit would manifest in a general "sex drugs and rock n roll" manner but now manifests in interest in traveling, or the picking up of different hobbies, like dog showing or geocaching.
I am of the opinion that I haven't changed much over time. I am still into the same things. my mother used to always explain me to people with the same line - "she's into the 4 'R's - reading, writing, running, and riding" (horses). The first two are the same, though my tastes on those has changed over time, and although I only run ocassionally these days, I still like to get all self-competitive with solo sports. Dogs have been substituted for horses, and although I can't ride them, I still get the benefit of developing a mutually beneficial relationship with an animal who speaks "another language", but with whom you find a way to communicate with.
Recently an college coworker told me I had changed from the way he remembered me, with my kids and "enjoying what you do yet and want more" not who I was to him. When I questioned why my circumstance would imply I had changed, he suggested because my wild lifestyle when he knew me was incongruent with being a mother. He had me locked in the image of the "party girl" I was in my college years.
In some ways we change, yes. We evolve. We mature, grow up, move past the party life and into the family life. Yes, suddenly we're baking cookies and passing out Kool-Aid instead of cantering along on the back of a horse. We have a trunkful of tack that hasn't seen the light of day in seven years sitting in the garage, and bills instead of tests, and careers instead of jobs.
I, however, have been very proud that in spite of the changes, I remained true to who I was. I speaks of loyalty to me, like holding on to the friends of our youth and former flames. I want to be that loyal, still holding the halter of the horse she sold years ago, still looking through the old love notes from days gone by, silly and sentimental but always honest.
If I let it go, then it wasn't real. I was always real.
And I don't want to be the woman whose past didn't exist after she became a mother, or a lover, or born again. I want to be a woman shaped by her past but not defined by it, nor by the present, but rather somewhere in between. I am who I am, who I'd always been,who I'll always be.
To me.