To Be Who We Really Are

“This above all: to thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!”

(From “The Tragedy of Hamlet” by Shakespeare, Act 1 Scene 3, Lord Polonius)

To thine own self be true. HHhhhmmmmm………..There’s the rub!

There is the person we want to be. There’s the person we should be. There’s the person we present to the world as who we are. But to actually be who we really are is the most difficult to do and more impossible, to be!

We have created a version of our self that we present to the world. This version is tweaked and altered depending where we are and who we are with. We do this so as not to hurt or offend others or to impress and mislead.

But what if we were able to remove any and all barriers and facades? What if what we thought and felt was expressed and demonstrated. Would we recognize us?

Probably the greatest challenge is to be who we are. Should we even try?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not talking about unleashing our primal, carnal self, what Freud called the “id”. In Freudian terms, it is the superego that I’m addressing more than anything else. The superego is basically the hall monitor of self. It keeps both extremes, the id and the ego in check. But I’m thinking beyond these things.

A part of what we do and say, if not a large part, is an auto response. What we do and say is a knee jerk reaction to what we feel and think. I can’t stress this enough; intellect and reason are controlled or at least swayed by our emotion and conception, no matter how fickle, fleeting, or flighty they may be.

But while we defend our thoughts and emotions, do we ever pause to 1. Recognize and identify and 2. understand them? Why do we have these thoughts and emotions in the first place?

You know, when we repent, we are to search the heart completely. We are to find sin and then define the sin. We are to give that sin to Jesus and be remorseful, not just for doing it, but recognizing that all sin is bad and an affront to God. We should see sin as ugly and terminal. Finally, after we give our sin to Jesus, we are to ask for forgiveness and mercy.

Find the sin, identify the sin, understand it and be remorseful, hand it over to Christ, and then honestly and earnestly ask for forgiveness and mercy.

But why stop at sin?  Why not investigate the whole self? Why not understand our self completely and be that self, or change that self?

Who are we and why? If only we could draw a straight line from the inner man to the outer man.

Bill Hitchcock