Discovering “What I Am”

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” – Michel Foucault. Discuss

What I am is a question we ask ourselves over and over again throughout life. The unknown of why we go through all we do, forever keeps us guessing. None of us are supposed to know exactly “what I am”. That is the great thing about life: on any given day we can choose to recreate who we are. The heartaches, the sorrows, the happiness, they are all meant for a divine reason.  They are meant to either correct a behavior or perfect us into the people we are meant to be in this lifetime.

It wasn’t until February 2017 when “what I am” became into question. It was like any normal day, I got the boy off to school, the husband on his way and off I went. Little did I know that would be the last time I would be doing that. By days end my life had completely changed as I had known it for the past 20 years. I would no longer wake up in my home next to my husband or my son. It had felt like someone had ripped my soul out, complete emptiness. The only thing I could feel was the ache in my heart, which most days seemed like too much to bear.  My life was spinning out of control and I had no way to stop it. Months later I found my self all alone in a small apartment. Everything was different. There was complete silence and none of the things that surrounded me were familiar. I no longer knew who I was. At this point I only had two choices, I could wallow in my pain or pick myself back up and start all over again. For the next two and half years it was heartache after heartache.  Every time I got close to feeling like myself again something bad would happen. Everything that I felt so deeply attached to was being stripped away from me one by one.  It felt like I was being punished. I couldn’t understand: I believed I was a good person, I was doing the right things, and I had worked hard to help provide for my family. I didn’t understand, why me?

It wasn’t until Easter 2018, I started to see things differently, when I attended a church picnic at the beach. I started to understand the reasons why things were being taken from me and why my life had changed so much. I had always been a little uptight, a highly-stressed worrier, but I was a kind person. Lately though I was walking around on eggs shells trying to please people, living a life where I always wanted more or needed more to keep up with the Jones’. I was turning my head to the things I should had been confronting. I had gotten so far away from who I was brought up to be. I had lost myself.  I had become selfish, angry and self-entitled. I was like a ticking time bomb. Qualities I never thought I would possess as a person. I didn’t like myself much. I started to see these things and recognize certain behaviors. It was inevitable, change needed to happen. Day by day I could feel the old me slipping away, like a snake shedding its skin and a new layer of myself was being replaced. Although I had less at this point in my life, I was becoming someone I liked, I was happy. I was figuring out the “why me”, and looking at the pain as a life lesson to get me to where I am today. The “what I am” was being defined everyday through the good and the bad. Change was happening so subtly that I didn’t even recognize it, until that one day when you wake up and you just feel different, but in a good way. Be open to learn from the everyday encounters we have, listen to the quiet signs that lead you to discover the “what I am”.

As you think about life and becoming someone different from the person you were in the beginning, recognize how you have grown through the experiences of life. Being ok with the unknown is ok. Not knowing what tomorrow will bring and living in the moment is life changing.  It is impossible to know exactly “what I am”, when life is about growing daily into our divine selves. We are never meant to be the same as we were in the beginning. Our souls define the “what I am”; the accomplishments we have achieved, or the things we have collected do not. The “what I am” has endless possibilities, it’s up to you to grow and discover.