"Episode 6: Your Life Story Isn't Who You Really Are..."

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Somewhere along the way, you start asking it, did I screw this up? Did I waste the one life I had? That question almost broke me. This is where I put it back together. Welcome to Eye of the Hurricane. Reclaim your calm.

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Welcome to the Eye of the Hurricane, and thanks for taking the time to join today. So, hi, I've got an interesting episode today, one I'm pretty excited about. But I recently heard a talk from Eckhartali, who wrote the tremendous book, The Power of Now. And he asked a question in there that I continued to think about. And the question was: imagine waking up tomorrow with total amnesia. You don't have a name, you don't have a job, you have no family history, you have no memory of a single mistake that you ever made or a single thing that you ever built. Nothing. And the question becomes, who would you be? How would you describe who you were if you were asked in that particular moment? And if you sit with that, it's a fascinating premise. Because, you know, we tend to think in terms of our labels and our titles, you know, son, daughter, husband, wife, father, mother, you know, empath, fisherman, nurse, lawyer. I mean, the list is infinite. And maybe we think of ourselves as the one that people call when something's broken, or that, you know, we're the person that's supposed to have it all together. But if you took away your past, so you have none of those signposts, what actually would exist? So the question that I want us to think on is not who are we? Because that would take far longer than our eight minutes and we could go a million different directions. But who are we underneath all the titles that we list for ourselves? So if every one of those titles got taken away from us tonight, and I don't mean metaphorically, I mean if somebody actually took them away, who's left standing in the room? So to me, here's what I find strange. In that moment, if we didn't have any kind of a resume or story and we had no past, we wouldn't be gone. You and I would still be standing here. We'd still be breathing, we'd still be aware of our surroundings. Um, we still would be somebody that was having an experience of being alive, if you will, even with absolutely nothing to call ourselves. So it's almost troubling in some ways because we're we're so equipped and we're so conditioned over years to add these different things to our identity that if suddenly we didn't have anything to recall, just sitting with ourselves would be would be a fascinating experience. So I guess whatever, whatever that is the thing that's still there when all the labels are gone, you know, it's quite possible that that's closer to who we actually are than anything that we can actually list out. So we know how that sounds, right? It it sounds a little bit abstract. It a lot of people say, man, that sounds like some some real new age bullshit. And um I I get it. I get it. And it's a little far, you know, compared to you're drinking coffee on a Tuesday morning and you've got your mortgage and your job and you've got all these people counting on you. I get it. Uh, but to me, here's why it actually matters and why I'm doing the episode on it. And in in a very non-philosophical way, I think every title that we have on our individual lists, they can actually be taken from us. And the funny thing is, it's not a matter of they might be taken from us. They absolutely will be eventually taken from us in one way, shape, or form, right? So it could be while we're alive, where, you know, the fact that we we are our jobs, but all of a sudden that job ends. There's a layoff, there's a retirement. Um, you know, everybody could have a have a bad quarter if you're an individual business owner, and all of a sudden the business shuts down. You know, our roles change. And like the kids, they grow up, they stop needing us in a way that they used to. Uh, I think empty nesters are one that you see all the time that struggle with identity after the change, right? They have been caretakers, they have been the parents all this time, and all of a sudden they've raised the kids to go do exactly what you want them to do. And suddenly we're left sitting there thinking, who are we? Because our identity is no longer that of taking care of kids. You know, marriages we've talked about in in prior episodes. Marriages end, you know, and for for 50% of the people, they end. So your identity can't be tied to the marriage itself because that's something that um it's not even even a solid marriage, it's still not solid ground since the the marriage will end someday, either with someone's passing or with a divorce. The body is another one, right? Our bodies break down. It's it's you know, we take pride in certain things that we could do with our with our bodies or the fact that we were athletes or whatever it may be, but the time comes where the body can't do what it used to do. So every single one of those titles, it has an expiration date, even the good ones, even the ones that we feel like we have built our entire lives. And if that title is who we are, if it's if it's being a doctor or a nurse or a teacher, and maybe sometimes it's not what we do, but it's it's the role we've played, right? I'm I'm the one that always has it together. I'm the one that's always the provider, I'm the one that always fixes the problems. Um, it's it's the actual foundation that we're standing on. What ends up happening is when that particular thing goes away, it doesn't just hurt us, right? It it erases us. All of a sudden, our identity is chipped away. We're no longer who we thought we were. And I think that's why some of us are in a position where we struggle so much after a layoff or a divorce. So it's not just um, it's not we just fall apart completely because of the situation itself, because there's a lot of people that go through those same things and they're all survivable. And there are people that go through things that are far worse than that. But it's because we lose, depending on how much we've tied in our identity to the things we do, we we really lose the answer to who am I? Right. In the same moment that we lose the things that we have ourselves tied to. So for me, and and you don't care specifically about me, but just to share, I have four tattoos I use as reminders for these things. So one of these is on my upper arm, it reads, I am. And I am reminds me that I'm here regardless of all my titles. So it reminds me sometimes more of what I am not than what I actually am. But for me, it it keeps me grounded. Another one I have is I have detach on my other arm. And detach, um, I also have on my license plate. And I have it to remind me that even when I give 110% towards something and I have a specific outcome that I crave, I'm gonna work really hard to accept the outcome, no matter how it comes out, as if I chose it. So the idea is you you go with life's flow, even when the outcomes aren't exactly the way that we hoped. And I have found for myself that that has given me a lot of solace in times that in the past would have been very difficult. My third tattoo I have is one that says now, and it's one that um brings me back to the current moment. So uh again, in past episodes, I've talked about the idea of how often we spend our time in the past with what should have been different or what wasn't fair and the future of where salvation is going to live, right? Where if we're not happy with where we're at, how when the future gets here, we are gonna be happy. Now reminds me to stick into this moment and and not get taken either of the other two directions. And the last one I have is a four on my arm. That comes from Don Miguel Ruiz's Four Agreements book. Uh, if you've never read it, uh it's tremendous, super short read, um, four great life lessons. It's it's a book that if you haven't read, you'll really enjoy it. So um I, you know, I share that because uh I share it really because I think life stories dictate kind of who we are on a deeper level. And to me, that realization is really liberating. You can play all these parts, you know, and enjoy the movie of your life, right? Because it's basically what we're living. We're living a life. But we can do all that without taking it all quite so seriously. And once you realize you're not the roles that you play, you have you have created tremendous power within yourself. So to me, here's kind of what I think is is interesting or or worthwhile and believing together. And that is the the titles, they're not fake, they're they're not nothing because we built them and they do matter, and they're part of our life story. They are part of the movie that that we're going through, but they don't define our essence as a human being. So sometimes you think of your title or your mistakes or even your accomplishments. They're they're more the furniture, and they're not really the house, if that makes sense. So we can rearrange the furniture. You know, we can lose a piece of it, we can we can watch a room go totally empty, the house is still standing. We can replace things if we need to replace things. Um, but the house was never the couch or the table. It was always the thing that the all the furniture set inside of. So I think most of what gets called a midlife crisis for people, it's not really about the the aging piece. It's really uh it's more about the realization, usually the hard way, that we built this entire sense of self out of the furniture, but the furniture moves. So with this topic, I don't think there's really a problem that needs fixed. I I don't, it's not really why I why I created this episode, but it's just a subject that we can reflect on individually to see if there's any interesting observations we have. So next time you take a drive alone, just think on what if somebody took away your job title, they took away all the roles that you play, all the things that define you, they took away all your mistakes that you carry, and they also took away all the great accomplishments and the things that you're really proud of. So all of that stuff goes by the wayside. So if if that was gone all of a sudden, who would you be? And I think reflecting on that, maybe it'll bring some some interesting perspective. So with that said, I appreciate you tuning in. I'll see you on the next one.