Finding Our Way: Who Said It Was Going to Be Easy
By George Hull
“We are given a life, but we are not simply given ourselves. We become ourselves in the living of it.”
- José Ortega y Gasset
Finding our way in life is rarely easy. We are born into a world already filled with voices telling us who we are and who we should become. We learn early how to smile to belong, how to be cute, how to protect ourselves from rejection, how to succeed, and how to hide those parts of ourselves that are less welcomed. Without ever quite noticing, we can spend years becoming the person our family and the world have taught us to be.
Then the teenager arrives on the scene, asking life's big question:
Who am I?
Perhaps this is part of the deeper wisdom hidden within the age-old story of Pinocchio. He longs to become a real boy, as though somewhere beyond himself there was an ideal life just waiting for him.
Yet his journey is not simply that from puppet to boy. It is a journey toward himself and, importantly, a separation from those who have pulled his strings. Carl Jung might describe this as a journey of individuation, the gradual becoming of oneself. Pinocchio must wander, become lost, follow voices that lead him astray, and discover the consequences of his choices, much like Adam and Eve in the Genesis creation narrative, and slowly learn to recognize what is true. My old colleague George Buck would say, “All behavior has meaning.”
To be sure, there is something of Pinocchio in all of us.
We, too, spend much of our lives discovering which strings are still attached, some rigged by love, some tethered by fear, some by the demands and expectations of those who raised us, and some by the world into which we were born. We may become so accustomed to their tug and pull that we mistake their orchestration for our own movements.
Then life interrupts us.
A relationship ends, a loved one passes away, we leave home. The job or career that once gave us a sense of identity is no longer enough. We encounter the harsh realities of life: failure, illness, a series of disappointments that cancel our dreams, and the strange realization that the life we have been living no longer feels entirely like our life.
Like a puppy nipping at our heels, the question returns:
Who am I?
Perhaps becoming oneself is not about discovering some perfect self hidden deep within us. Perhaps it is more like slowly learning to recognize the difference between the voices that have shaped us and the voice that is becoming our own, as we dare to become an authority in our own lives.
These uncomfortable thoughts and feelings are not necessarily a rejection of where we came from or of those with whom we have shared our lives. We are bound to carry our histories, our loves, our wounds, our triumphs, and the many ways we learned to survive life's challenges. They are part of the person we have become.
The task is not to treat our life's experience as baggage to be left outside the door, but to discover what we might do with it, to understand it, make use of it, and perhaps, in time, accept it.
Jung called it individuation. Others have called it becoming authentic. Perhaps, in simpler terms, it is learning how to live into one's own life, to become more authentically oneself.
And for that, there is no timetable.
For we are never simply the person we long to become, nor are we entirely free to invent ourselves anew. We stand somewhere between inheritance and possibility, between what has been given to us and what we might yet become.
Perhaps that is why the question “Who am I?” eventually changes. It begins to move from a question of identity toward a question of becoming:
“Who am I becoming?”
And there is something hopeful in that question.
It means the story is not finished.
