Who Are You Practicing Yourself to Be?

Identity doesn’t appear from nowhere. It takes form through what we attend to, value, inherit, repeat, and practice.

There are moments when life interrupts the person we have learned to be.

A child arrives. A relationship begins or ends. The body changes. A familiar role is no longer available. Something asks us to move differently, but we do not yet know how.

For me, becoming a mother was one of those interruptions.

Motherhood changed the movement of my time, attention, body, relationships, and responsibilities. It asked something of me that could not simply be added to the life I was already living.

Until then, I had already become someone.

I had ways of functioning, responding, caring, coping, and continuing. Some had formed through choice. Others had formed through relationship, culture, necessity, and survival. Many had been repeated for so long that they no longer felt like patterns.

They felt like me.

This is part of what makes the origin of the word identity so revealing.

Identity comes through the Latin identitas, from idem, meaning “the same.”

It originally named the quality through which someone or something could be recognized as the same across time.

But what creates that experience of sameness within a human life?

A way of responding happens once, and it’s an experience. It happens repeatedly, and it becomes familiar. It becomes established, and eventually we begin to recognize ourselves through it.

We say…

This is what I do. This is how I am. This is who I am.

Identity isn’t false because it has been formed. It gives continuity to our commitments, relationships, responsibilities, and place within the world. But its formation is worthy of our attention.

What have I repeated so consistently that I now experience it as my nature?

What did I inherit before I had the language to question it?

What receives my attention because it confirms the person I already understand myself to be?

And from what state am I answering the question, Who am I?

Sometimes an interruption feels like the problem because it’s where the strain becomes visible. But it may also be the place where an established identity can no longer continue without being examined.

Life interrupts the same.

And in that interruption, we may finally see what sameness has been sustaining.

My newest spoken reflection, Who Are You Practicing Yourself to Be, explores how identity takes form through attention, orientation, relationship, and practice… and what becomes possible when we begin to participate consciously in the person we are becoming.

watch or listen to the reflection

Before you go, you might sit with this:

What form of me is my current practice establishing?

Slow down.
Gather yourself.
Return to what is true.