Who We Are

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.
Jean-Paul Sartre

What have other people made of you? Chances are the picture they have created of you is like a crazy quilt. One person thinks you're fat. Another thinks you're thin. So which are you? You can't be both. This is why you can't rely on someone else's opinion. It is colored by their own experiences and their own comparisons with what they like and don't like. It has nothing to do with who you really are.

The only person who knows who you really are is you. And who you really are has nothing to do with comparisons with other people and value judgements about what you like and don't like about them. But we are all very social creatures. What other people say is extremely important to us, even when it is someone who we don't particularly care about. It takes a lot of diligent effort to ignore their opinions of us.

But the hardest thing of all is to ignore the opinions of our families, who have known us our whole lives. Yet their opinions are often the most faulty. It is our families who have the most to lose if we are not the way they think we should be or expect us to be. And it is them who have been telling us who we are all our lives since "We know you better than anyone else does". But they do not know us better than we know ourselves, however much they may claim to the contrary.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us. It takes courage to reject completely what other people say about us and determine for ourselves who we are. We may not always like what we see. But then we may also discover strengths and capabilities we never knew we had.
Knowing who we are means knowing what we can really do, and when we know what we can really do, we can more fully reach for what we really want.

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