coming of age . . . deferred

Existential crisis:  how am I not myself?

So, the other day my boss, who is slightly crazy yet I still respect her, took it upon herself to psychoanalyze me.  Her main points were as follows:

- I still haven't found myself

- I have no idea what I want to do with life

- I have commitment issues

- I think women are evil

- I cater too much to my parents

- I value my freedom above anything and everything and everybody

For a while now I have habitually avoided asking myself deep questions about myself.  I think this is due to a sort of rebellion against the relentless inwardness that serves as the core of evangelical Christian culture.  I've dealt with God knows how many years of being told that you have to dissect yourself at a "soul level" in order to sift the wheat from the chaff etc. etc.

I am fully convinced that this is crap.  I think it is an ideology that paralyzes people in a myopic spiritual narcissism that merely allows preachers to reign in their purity and maintain a salary.  So, I decided around a year ago to quit.  And, I've been floating along now for a year; sometimes I merely tolerate my life which isn't the one I've always dreamed of, and sometimes I've still found myself pleasantly content.  But, one thing I've noticed, I never feel stagnant, which I remember feeling constantly when I thought that I should aspire to constantly hold my soul under a magnifying glass.

I actually feel quite the opposite of stagnation, lately I've felt as though there is never enough time to reflect or consider.  I've felt that I am perpetually in motion even when I forget what that motion is taking me toward.  Basically busyness has occupied the void left in my life which was formerly dedicated to hours of wondering whether my intentions were of God or of the devil.

And so, in the middle of work the other day, when I should be diligently driving towards results in the holy cause of staying busy, my boss gives me her diagnosis, and it really threw me off.  I mean, I was really bothered by it, and couldn't get what she said off of my mind.  This unfortunately informs me that there must be some truth to what she said.  

So having given it some thought, here's what I think:

true, false, true, false, probly true, and true.

So, moving on.  I think I'm more and more of an anti-essentialist.  This presents me with a problem in the "search for myself" since I'm not really convinced there is a "me" out there waiting to be found . . . by me that is.  I really think we, and the communities we are part of, decide or create the people that we are.  So, for me, I feel it's less a matter of finding myself, and more a matter of deciding who I will be, which I find to be infinitely more challenging.  I would love to believe I could simply stumble upon my own essence, but unfortunately I feel pretty certain that Plato was full of crap.

I do know what I want in life.  Though the picture in my head is always a vague blur, I still feel certain about the big pieces of it.  I think that this is what should inform me of "finding" who I want to be, since that's actually part of the picture.

And, so, I've returned to a place in my life where I need to start asking tough question of myself.  The things we avoid are most often those which we most need to address.

I talked with a friend the other day about the odd concept of adulthood, which we are technically a part of, but only technically.  Both of us are over half way through our twenties and still found it odd to think of ourselves as being "a man" or "a woman".    I think maybe that's what my boss in all of her clairvoyance was getting at . . . I have a lot of growing up to do.  Not something that I haven't heard before, but maybe something that for the first time I agreed with upon hearing.