I once officiated an outdoor wedding on the slopes of Beaver Creek Ski Resort. My part of the ceremony – a 10 minute sermonette – wasn’t anything special, but I spent nearly the entire reception in a beautiful mountainside lodge fielding more compliments than I deserved. The bride broke away at one point to tell me how impressed everybody was. “Where did you find this guy?” her friends were asking.

I’ll never forget that night, not because I managed to accidentally distinguish myself, but because I didn’t want it to end, and was heartbroken when it did.

I’ve experienced similar moments throughout life, and have spent a mountain of time, energy, and other resources hoping to experience more. Nothing feels better than believing that there’s something special about me, like I matter so much that a hundred people or so will sit glued to their seat, fixated as I share 10 minutes of marriage wisdom that they seemed to never have heard before.

Outside of those moments, I typically don’t feel like I’m anything special, forced to turn to the ages-old identity boost of judging others. If I can’t feel good about myself, the reasoning goes, I can focus on what sucks about everyone else. I might be confused about who I am, but at least I’m not like all the losers who can’t get their act together.

Impressive?

We all struggle with the pain and misguided odyssi that come part and parcel with our search for identity. Typically, we move from “who am I?” briskly into the next question, “what have I done with my life?” At that point, we’re not asking who we are, we’re asking how we’ve distinguished ourselves among other humans, like our identity revolves around the idea that we have to be different and/or better than everyone else.

But I don’t know anyone who’s accomplished something, or a long string of somethings, who walked away considering their quest for identity complete. The answer to “who am I?” is much more powerful than the acquisition of material goods, or lifetime accomplishments, or whatever we pursue in the hopes of defining ourselves.

A few nights ago, during the Oscars ceremony, I watched Brendan Fraser accept the highest award an actor can get. He didn’t see it coming, and had a hard time hiding his reaction to the highest court in the land having declared him the best actor of 2023.

Only one person gets that award each year.

He’s been an actor most of his life, with scores of movies under his belt. His most recent project, a long-shot to say the least, has grossed over $17,000,000 and is among the top 100 movies of 2022/23 – easily the biggest movie he’s ever starred in. Now, an Oscar.

As exciting as all of that must be, whatever identity boost came with it will wear off in time. It might even have some negative consequences.

…even in the unlikely event one attains great wealth or celebrity status, it’s unlikely to provide meaningful satisfaction. Being valued for these distinctions just accentuates the emptiness, insecurity, or self-doubt that pushed one to achieve them.

It’s great to honor the accomplishments of others, especially those in the entertainment industry – I love watching the Oscars – I don’t believe that everyone chases big dreams because of some insecurity.

But too many of us do.

I found this year’s Oscar celebration particularly taxing, with so many happy people standing behind a plexiglass pulpit, pumping their trophy high in the air, preaching about the importance of perseverance – that dreams do come true – failing to mention that there has to be, by definition, people “below” the winners, those who can never “get there,” folks whose dreams of getting an Oscar will never materialize.

What should we tell them about dreams and hard work?

Ultimately, thankfully, their (our) fate is the same as the “winners’.” No matter what we attain, if we answer, “who am I?” with accomplishments, impressive deeds, “dreams come true,” etc., we’ll always be asking.

As someone who’s only recently begun to stop attempting big things in the hopes of finding myself, I have some thoughts about how we might better answer such a tough question. While none of what follows is sexy, or exciting, you’ll be happy to know that, in my opinion, everything we need is sitting, quite literally, under our noses.

The Only You

There are plenty of things that are replicated in our world, over and over again, but you’re not one of them. Your look, your personality, your experiences, friends, abilities, etc., all culminate in something ordained to appear just this once in our universe.

As huge as the cosmos is, it only has the power/will/whatever to create one of you; one time only.

That should put a big dent in your identity confusion.

That’s also why the people who are are closest to you aren’t confused about who you are, or need you to go and accomplish big things before they can define you. That’s also why we love our kids, especially in their younger years, doing little to impress us because that’s not who they are in our eyes.

To the people that love you the most, you’re you, and that’s plenty. If you want to work hard at understanding who you are, do the work of seeing yourself as they do, and ask yourself what gets in the way.

My kids aren’t confused about who I am, neither is my wife. There are certainly others who don’t get me, and I always focus on their opinion for some reason. I have no problem whatsoever agreeing with the people who don’t like me, or seeing myself from their perspective.

If I was healthy, it’d be the other way around.

Magic

Next, you are a formerly single-celled organism that found a way to become the most complex organism in the universe. But that’s everybody. There’s no magic there, or at least none that we’re willing to call magic.

If, however, all of a sudden, I could fly, you’d say “miracle!” until everyone started to fly, then we’d call it “natural,” adjusting our culture and systems to concede yet another miracle that’s not a miracle because everyone can do it.

This is where science, important as it is, gets in the way. We’ve defined so many miraculous things, then dismissed them. Nevermind that our knowledge of this universe is vastly oustripped by our ignorance of it, or that we can’t replicate a flea, much less a single living cell. We’re moving in that direction to be sure – more technological advancements that further incite us to ignore what we don’t know. We’ll always have a mountain of unknowns before us yet still dismiss so many miracles because we found a name for them and convinced ourselves that we know how they work and where they came from.

We are, still, 2-year-olds in a sandbox trying to figure out a universe that’s billions of years old, convinced that we’ve got it mostly figured out. No wonder we can’t answer a simple question like “who am I?”

To understand who/what we are, we’re going to have to stop now and again and acknowledge the utter miracle of human life and the miracle of the cosmic context that cradles it.

Celebration

Again, none of that sounds sexy/powerful/magic/impressive. But that’s not because they’re not impressive, it’s because everyone has the same power, and we didn’t have to do anything to get it, which assaults our deeply rooted sense of what makes someone valuable.

But you can’t get your hands on anything more powerful than the things that will eternally be yours. If those don’t overthrow you, or at least impress you, nothing else is going to work. How could something less powerful – with far less magic – be more effective at securing your identity?

But that leaves us all with a difficult question: how then do we become impressed with what we already are, especially when there are so many dangling carrots promising more?

No idea. At the very least we’ve got some work to do, some values to shift around, and some ages old brain maps to rewire.

But if we don’t want to do the work now, we can do it later, when we’re old, unable to chase big things, or be impressed with what we see in the mirror. Physical appearance, career, accomplishments, abilities, whatever, will then live just beyond our grasp, and the memory of the time that we attained those things won’t bring any peace.

The good news is that the things I mentioned above will still be very much in play, sitting on the shelf where we left them, like a dusty Oscar statue that we’ve ignored forever, waiting for us to embrace them, and finally celebrate.

Without that, whenever it might happen, we’ll never understand who we truly are.

Photo by Melissa Askew on Unsplash