Are you the you you think you are?

No one has to agree with us about who we are. 

Bravo or Boohoo? 

It’s easy enough to say something like this on paper, but is it possible to live our lives as if other people’s opinions don’t matter? Are you living on the outside the life you dream of on the inside? Does the image of who people think you are mesh with the “who” you know yourself to be? How can you even know? How can they, when everything we perceive is based on our own life experiences?

Who are you?

Are you a composite of what those around you have chosen to see? Are you who you are based on who you’ve spent your time with? Have commercials told you what you lack, or need, and movies and television shown you what friendship and love mean?

I sometimes wonder, do country music songs sing of how love is, or how we wish for love to be?

We notice how our parents and others respond to us, and how they speak to each other, what their words say as well as what their body language broadcasts. We measure ourselves against the background of the music we listen to, our ethnic norms, social class, religion, and education. Even our horoscope adds to the soup that we call “me”.

None of us grows up in a bubble. We are surrounded by millions of silent visual clues that approve or disapprove, a frown, a smile, a sigh, and we respond in ways that conform or rebel. Either way, we come to know “who” we are through the fusion of our input.

The good and the bad news is, you are more than a sum of our parts. You are more than an iPhone filled with apps. You are a unique spark in an infinite cosmos. Corny, I know, but the only way we can be defined by consensus is if we agree and believe that who others say we are, is the “who” we feel ourselves to be.