On Being Me

I won't lie, I'm 34 and it feels a little immature to be going through the angst of "finding myself" that we generally associate with the tumult of being a college student. The questions I'm asking about what it means to be me aren't the same as they were when I was 10 years younger. In my early 20's I still had a ton of handed down, pre-conceived notions of who I was supposed to be, and what I ought to expect from the world.

I spent a good part of my 20's discovering my own shadow. I discovered that the things I feared and called evil and tried to distance myself from were in fact part of my own shadow side. The more I began to come to terms with my shadow, the more I realized that I was in fact not so different from every other living being. The more I began to draw self-identity from an honest look at who I was, not who I wished I was, or from who I was afraid to be, the more I stopped comparing myself to others.

For all 2 of you who read this, I'll admit that I continue to be tempted to compare, rank and rate myself by a measurement system based on people I both admire and loathe. I doubt that temptation will ever not be there.

The struggle I'm in now, in my mid-30's, is this: just how much am I willing to sacrifice to continue to be the real me? How much self-integrity would I trade for convenience, job-security, relevance or success? (I hate the idea of relevance, isn't being human relevant enough!?) Can a person forever resist the lure of power, status, novelty, and security as the world defines it? Conventional wisdom would suggest everyone has a price. What's mine? I don't know. Hence the angst. I can only hope that the price of being anything less than the true "me" not driven by ego, or bound by fear is so high that I'll never sell out.