Be Who You Are
I used to struggle to call myself a writer, an artist, a photographer. Didn’t I have to make money at something to be that?Even if I did make money at it, did the label really fit? Sometimes I forgot that I had earned paychecks as a writer (my name in print as staff writer at two newspapers, freelance gigs that included the rewriting of a software manual, editing and proofreading jobs), an artist (paid graphic design and book layout work), and a photographer (senior picture sessions and homeschool prom gigs for which money changed hands).
What I suffered from was generally known as Impostor Syndrome, but most who throw the term around have no idea that it’s actually a trauma response, and that it develops because when you do not understand who you are, you can never trust that who you’re trying to be is legit. (I put that statement in bold because it’s the important part; please give it some thought.)
The ironic part for me is that, for 54 years, I had no idea that the label I clung to like a life preserver was the biggest lie of all: Catholic. Until I understood that, all my attempts at healing the physical, emotional, and psychological manifestations of my trauma were fruitless.
Now that I do understand, I focus more on being than on naming (and couldn’t care less about external markers like money changing hands or other quantifiers).
I do, however, live in a society in which labels are of the utmost importance—ever wonder why that is?—and I recognize that they have their (limited) place. Therefore, I have come up with a few that fit me.
First, the rather mundane, expected ones:
- wife
- mother
- writer*
- photographer
- artist
Then, those that feel more right:
- researcher
- connector of dots
- storyteller
- listener
- librarian
- companion
Yes, those last six feel especially right.
How about you? Are you sporting labels that don’t fit? Do you understand where they came from? Is it time to discard them and find out who you really are?
*Since the writing of this post would not have happened without the words that Stanley Kunitz wrote in his introduction to Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected, I will include them here in this note, as it’s an important reminder: “The writer today, said Albert Camus in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize, ‘cannot serve those who make history; he must must serve those who are subject to it.'”
**
**Two-year-old photo of me in my wreck of a kitchen taken by Bridget Ruffing
Heliocentric
