Every Saturday morning, I make an o’dark thirty run to downtown Seattle. It’s not something I do with great frequency. 4:30 is damned early on a weekend, but when there’s a damsel in distress, what’s one to do? Put on the slightly tainted armor and ride off to the rescue. Or should I say in this case, drive off to the rescue.
I had planned to immediately return to my semi-conscious state in the bed. But as I flipped through the channels, up popped one of my favorite “seen this a dozen times movies.” These are ideal to fall to sleep to because you already know how everything turns out.
I happened upon the scene in Forget Paris when Debra Winger’s marriage to Billy Crystal is on the rocks. Over a glass of wine, she talks about her rebound relationship and that perhaps she should have spent some real time alone so she could find herself.
Ah, I remember those days of trying to find myself. There were several significant times in my life that I went in search of me. I thought there was some magical point in your life that you find out who you are. It’s akin to climbing to the mountain top and some wise sage waiting for you tells you the meaning of life and you reply, “So that’s it! This is what I’ve been searching for.”
The sad truth is, I never found myself. I looked hard for me, too. I searched high and low, long and hard. I looked under and in the beds of women I slept with. I went on a walkabout and got lost along the way because I will never ask directions. I have questioned myself like a contestant on Jeopardy who didn’t have a buzzer and I’ve called out in anguish to God, only to get a busy signal.
I even considered putting myself on a milk carton to see if I would eventually turn up.
I didn’t.
Oh sure, there were the extremely reflective and equally delusional times when I thought I had figured it all out. “This is who I am,” I would proclaim, and for a while, I lived that persona… the loyal husband, the doting father, the hard working employee, the supportive son, the pillar of the community.
But eventually, I found out the journey to find myself came to a dead end. In all the excitement of finding out what I was to do with my life, I forgot one important thing – the journey never ends, nor is it supposed to.
I know this because I have several friends who seem to think their journey is all done. They cast their lot as a self-sacrificing mother, a hard working dolt, an unloved housewife, a cheating husband, a guy in midlife crisis. They have decided somewhere along the way that their life is whatever it turned out to be, for better or worse. They firmly believe that they figured out who they are and that definition is a “suffering bastard” or “self-loathing bitch.”
I can say this because I’ve been there. I’ve played the role of suffering bastard many times in my life, all because I mistakenly believed that this incarnation of me was who I actually was.
Well, that was a bunch of horsesh**t. Still, I convinced myself that yes, that is who I was. I grabbed onto it with gusto, too. Initially, I would be the wonderful person others wanted me to be. I would fill the role perfectly, thinking this is who I am.
What I didn’t realize, of course, is that no one can ever stay the same. We are works in progress at best. Yes, some of us find our calling early in life and we go on to live it fully. But I think that’s a rarity.
In some cases, I think we just decide that this is the life we chose. We’re stuck with it, so we’ll just make the best of it. We continue on in a charade of a marriage, living with someone who doesn’t love us anymore, if they ever did. We live in a constant state of denial, telling ourselves that it will get better. We won’t even entertain the thought that our significant other may already be shagging someone else, sharing bedroom secrets with them that they never shared with us.
Again, been there, done that. I put on the brave face, threw myself into all sorts of activities and causes, pretended things were just fine to my close friends, all the time, crumbling inside, becoming hollow in hurt, not only giving up everything I wanted in my life, but giving up my very soul in the process.
Watching Forget Paris, I just had to laugh at Debra’s seemingly deep confidence to her friend. “Find out who I am.” It’s one of the funniest lines any script writer has written.
Sadly, some of us have fallen for it, too. We meditate about it, see a therapist, revel in deep thoughts as we pound down another bottle of wine, and we try our darnedest to pigeonhole ourselves into a neat, tidy box. If we’re unlucky enough to find that box, we quickly learn that it is a prison.
If we’re lucky, we eventually hatch a plan to escape. If we’re not, we simply resign ourselves to the fact that it’s a life sentence.
It never has to be. I’ve finally learned that lesson. I often joke that I can be tamed, but never corralled. I no longer seek the four walls that imprison me – the belief that I finally found myself.
Turns out I was never missing. I was just hidden inside a body that houses a very complex spirit, one that continues to defy description, which can never be satisfied with the status quo, who challenges conventions and who continues to evolve and change, recognizing that your past and even your present doesn’t have to define you. You always have the power, and in some sense the obligation, to reinvent yourself continually. Otherwise you’re not living – you’re just existing.
In the Emerald City, living life on my terms on an open ended lease,
– Robb