Who am I?

 I've been thinking recently about identity. What it means, what mine is, how do we know ourselves.

I was watching Moana with my daughter and there is a moment toward the end where Moana is having a crisis of faith in herself and her calling. She gets some good advice, and then she begins to identify the parts of herself that are foundational to who she is. She loves her island, she loves the sea, her role in her family and her community, she lists the struggles and challenges she has already faced and overcome. She draws these together and identifies herself by all of them. 

I was also having a conversation recently with a friend and it also got me thinking. How did I arrive at my identity? That intimate self-knowledge and awareness. Who even am I? How do I know? I wish I could say that I had a beautiful musical montage and awakening to self and at the end was confidently able to declare to the universe, "I am Leia!" but not so much. 

This is, as best I can tell, what really happened. For many years, I wrapped my identity in my pain, my trauma, and my anger. It drove me until it broke me. And then, sitting there in the shattered pieces of who I thought I was, I found a piece of myself that I didn't hate. I found compassion for someone else. 

Compassion was my first step, my first building block. But who am I? I am a girl who loves to write. So I write. I write a lot. I write my pain, and anger, and shame, and guilt, and somehow it helps. So I have compassion and writing. I find that I love my family, this weird bunch of people with funny edges that seem to fit mine. So now, family is important and necessary, and I'm adding people to it because family isn't just what you are born into. 

Over the years I have added empathy, a love of fantasy novels, the joy of cooking. I love making people laugh. I love singing (in choir, no karaoke solos for me!). Knit these all together, and it gives you a picture of me. 

But still...are these things me? I am, and am not, all of these things. I am, and am not, any label that I might choose or have ascribed to me. The person sitting here, writing all of this, thinking these thoughts, is me, but I seem to be on an endless quest to discover exactly who this person is and how they fit into the world. 

And at the end of the day, what is me except a lot of fat sitting in salt water with electricity running through it?