Last month I celebrated my seventy-second birthday. If you had been there, you might not have seen all of me. In my lifetime I have had multiple selves, including many of the familial ones: daughter, sister, aunt, niece, wife, and mother. Then there were the vocational ones, such as waitress, public school teacher, small business owner, resort manager, consultant and newsletter editor. Like a suit of clothes, some of these roles were a perfect fit; others underwent alterations; some wore out or became too small and were discarded; others continue to allow for further growth. All of these roles have shaped me and my life’s journey.
Like most people in search of their “selves,” my journey began as an adolescent. It was during those bittersweet years that I discovered some of my life passions that would shape my identity. My love of reading and books expanded my world and excited my imagination. School was a wonderful place where I encountered teachers who saw in this shy, awkward, skinny, spectacled young girl with coke bottoms for lenses and thick braces bolted to her teeth, something special that she was unable to see. I discovered I had a gift for acting that increased my self-esteem. What was even better, as a young actress I could be the outgoing, confident extrovert that I longed to be in real life.
Fast forward and I am still a reader but now I have a Kindle that increases the font size for my failing eye sight. Instead of reading about interesting places, I visit them; thus, I think of myself as a “world traveler.” These days I describe myself as a “lover of theater and the arts,” rather than actress. My self keeps on evolving as I learn more about who I am through new roles, such as grandma, gardener, volunteer worker, and Unitarian Universalist.
Examining my life roles has taught me much about who I am. More importantly it has caused me to reflect on what I have done these 72 years. Have I made a difference in anyone’s life? How have I used my personal gifts to serve? How have my relationships fared? How well have I integrated my multiple selves into a single whole? The late UU Reverend Forrest Church said, “When we integrate our values, projects, and relationships, our lives cohere.