Refusing to Abandon Ourselves
A few evenings ago, while watching a movie with Lady Birdsong, a single line caught Lady Uppity’s attention:
How am I not myself?
The question lingered.
The longer she sat with it, the stranger it became, so much so that she set her wine glass down and jotted a note in her leatherbound journal.
In her youth, Lady Uppity spent years searching, though she was never quite sure what she was looking for. She felt like a stranger and simply wanted to know how to fit into the world around her.
Lady Uppity paused the movie and hit the back button so she could hear that line once more.
“How am I not myself?” the character asked.
This question stirred something deep inside. Maybe, all those years ago, what she was looking for was the freedom to be herself.
One of Lady Uppity’s favorite spiritual teachers, Ram Dass, often spoke about the suit we wear—the identities, stories, and roles we collect throughout a lifetime.
What she thought she heard was that freedom required removing the suit altogether.
“Just who am I then?” she wondered. “And how in blazes do I find myself?”
Confused but determined to find inner peace, Young Lady Uppity took a deep breath and stepped onto a mysterious and somewhat terrifying path in search of answers.
She dutifully repeated the words:
I’m not my job.
I’m not my relationships.
I’m not my body.
I’m not my story.
And for a while, that was useful because it brought awareness as to who she thought she was and who she thought she had to be to be loved and accepted in the world.
But now, hearing this question, another understanding begins to arrive.
Lady Uppity had been Lord Honey Bear’s wife.
Now she’s a widow.
And a daughter, and a mother.
She is also a writer.
She is a friend.
She is all of those things. And more – meditator, facilitator, Reiki healer, essential oil maven, and sudoku puzzle wizard, to name a few.
These are truths.
The trouble began when she started believing that any one of these roles contained the whole of who she was.
What if the suit was never the problem?
What if forgetting she was wearing it was the problem? If these identities were all part of her, how could she not be herself?
Many spiritual traditions subtly imply that the true self is always peaceful, wise, loving, and serene. If our work is to uncover and live from our essential nature, wouldn’t that naturally include the parts that are painful and uncomfortable?
Lady Uppity’s life has shown her something different.
The woman who sat in meditation is real.
The woman who panicked when the pipe burst is also real.
The woman who trusts life is real.
The woman who worries is real.
The woman who knows she is home within herself is real.
The woman who forgets is real.
The woman who seeks is real.
The Freedom to Be Both
What if freedom isn’t found by being perfectly serene or by removing uncertainty, but rather in the acceptance that life is uncertain, unpredictable?
What if the true self that Ram Dass spoke about is spacious enough to hold both peace and uncertainty at the same time?
Freedom isn’t found in becoming someone else.
It isn’t found in becoming enlightened.
It isn’t found by meditating perfectly or by always feeling positive.
And it certainly isn’t found by becoming passive and calm all the time.
This new awareness that Lady Uppity is experiencing speaks the question over and over: how am I not myself? Now there is a fresh new willingness to belong to herself exactly as she is.
Looking back, the search itself was beginning to feel a little odd.
The indisputable fact is that Lady Uppity had always been herself.
And now she understands that she never lost herself. All those years she’d been editing herself, drawing red circles around certain parts and labeling them, not good enough.
Now she realizes that she had intentionally invited each part of her self into her life.
The frightened woman had been invited.
The uncertain woman had been invited.
The woman who wanted approval had been invited.
The woman who forgot everything she thought she knew had also been invited.
It turned out these parts of who she is had never been the problem.
After all these years of searching, Lady Uppity had finally stopped standing at the door checking invitations and simply joined the party herself.
After all these years, she was beginning to see that the answer is:
She was never not herself.
Awakening was never about becoming someone new, someone else.
It was about refusing to abandon herself, every single part of who she had ever been.