Hello Zita!

You don’t sound like a lost little brat, and you shouldn’t call yourself that.

This particular crisis hasn’t been that strong for me, but other major crises in my life lead to my own vision of my “self”.

I was going through a turmoil, where a lot of things that I had believed in just shattered. My view of myself being one of those things. My mind just sort of cracked and I allowed it to. What I felt was just peace and deep understanding. “I” no longer existed in that moment, and I just felt like this being full of love. When I thought about things, I didn’t respond to the thoughts as I usually would have, but just with love and understanding. I wouldn’t say that I felt connected to everything, but after that experience, I did often think about other people and how they would have a similar structure. That what I see in them, who they seem to be is not the totality of who they are, and what is underneath is more similar than different.

After those experiences, I lost the fear of an identity crisis. Who I am is more than my body and my personality. It helps me to be more flexible, and it’s good to be flexible, I think. I remember reading this short story on a website with Osho writings. I’ll paraphrase the story here:

It was about an army man, who knew his abilities and shortcomings and was very realistic about how to approach things. Osho called him a very brave man. The man himself at first said that he wasn’t brave, because he was actually afraid of things. Osho said that that’s what made him brave. The man accepted this idea. He then started to think of himself as a brave man and subsequently lost his ability to be realistic. He finally found himself in a situation where he was scared and realized that he wasn’t brave at all. His bravery wasn’t a fixed personality trait, but spawned from other qualities in him.

I think the story illustrates the problem with having strong beliefs about who you actually are. Us humans have the unfortunate quality that we are able to mix imagination and reality, and if we truly believe that we are something, then we live as we are that thing, even if we actually aren’t. Then when we are forced to face the reality, our world shatters and we face a crisis of the self.

So I say, be flexible 🙂 Does it matter who you are? If and when someone asks me what am I like as a person, I often respond that I’m a very typical Aquarian, regardless of if you believe in that or not. I have many of the qualities ascribed to Aquarians. I’m still not going to take it too seriously. I’d rather be flexible and try to allow my true nature to come out at all times. If you believe that you are a certain type and hold onto that belief, then it would constrain you. You wouldn’t be able to be authentic anymore, because you’d think that “I am a person who’s so I must respond to this situation in a certain way”. Who you are will become apparent at every turn, and even if you didn’t know who you are, you still wouldn’t be lost, because you’re still alive, in your body.

If you think about it, the whole “who am I?” question with feelings of being lost is kind of absurd. There you are. There. Where you are right now 🙂 And you are who you are.