Identities

A few months ago, I retired from the company where I had been working for the past twenty years. It was a change that I chose to make as I was getting a bit tired and wanted to do and enjoy other things. And, although I was looking forward to this, when the moment came to leave I realized how difficult it actually was. Saying good-bye was a very emotional experience. It was, in a way, a bit like losing part of my identity.

Throughout the course of our lives we create our identity based on external and material things that, given their intrinsic nature, are temporary. Who am I? or What am I? and we begin to review our external characteristics… I am the daughter of, the mother of, the wife or partner of, whatever our line of work is, or our nationality if we happen to have a defined nationality – in my case, I am a bit like the United Nations, I am the daughter of parents who emigrated from their countries, who in turn, were children of people who emigrated from theirs; I was born in one country, lived a few years in another, and ended up living in a different one.

Some years ago, I painted; that defined me… I was an artist. But life has this way of making its own twists and turns, and just when I thought I had found what I wanted most, life showed me that it is full of surprises waiting for you right around the corner, and, for various reasons, I had no choice but to start working at something that had absolutely nothing to do with what I had been doing until then. My identity as an artist was crushed to pieces and it was a very painful experience.

Luckily, growing older in some cases can give you more than just gray hair. As time goes by you learn that there is a reason for most things and that sometimes when one door closes, it is up to us to find another one that we can open. I have no idea what my life would have been like if I had continued painting. Would I, in time, have been successful? Maybe, but I wouldn’t have learned everything that I did learn during the years that I spent working, I wouldn’t have the wonderful friends that I made during this time, I might not have learned how to take advantage of most situations that one inevitably has to face in life, and I might not be writing this blog.

I also learned that we must find our identity within ourselves… Who are you really? What do you like? What do you dislike? What are your aspirations? What do you want from life? What are you capable of? What do you really believe in? These are characteristics that intrinsically belong to each one of us and that will probably not vary much, except through our own emotional growth and maturity.