Who Am I?

Last week I was thinking about personality and that seemingly ever present and always unanswerable question, "who am I?" It was brought on because someone had given me a compliment, and told me how much they looked up to me. As I thought about that compliment, I said to myself, "they wouldn't say that about me if they knew..." and began listing all the things I wasn't so great at or all the little slip ups I've had over the years. This lead me to wonder, am I what people say I am, or am I what I think of myself? (aka, who am I?) Then...it hit me. I shouldn’t concern myself with trying to define “who I am” or spending time trying to discover “me”. Instead I should be focusing on who I can be, and what I am capable of becoming.

In my second year of college I took a class that focused on the writings on C.S. Lewis. Throughout the class we were required to take quotes and sections from the books we read that had an impact on us. We were to expound on those and write a series of short papers which we published at the end of the class. One of my papers focused on that question of who I was, but I was never able to find the answer.

Since then I have thought on and off about that paper and the question surrounding it. Who am I? What is my personality? Is it possible to have different personalities at different times in our lives, or when we are around different people? Is only one of those personalities really us? I never came up with the answers. I stopped asking the concrete question of who I was, but I often thought about various parts of my personality and wondered if they would stick around or if I was just “faking”.

There is a quote by C.S. Lewis in his book “Mere Christianity” that I cannot quote exactly, but I remember fairly well. C.S. Lewis said that we should give Christ all that we are, the good and the bad, and let him make us what he wants us to be. I think I may have written one of my small papers on that when I took the class in college, but its meaning was never as clear to me then as it is now. I have great potential. My personality could be amazing. I could be like an angel (as a friend in 4^th grade once described me) if I give myself to Christ and focus on becoming what he can help me become.

This realization has given me a new goal to work towards. Now that I realize that I have been asking the wrong question, I can begin asking the right question. I can begin saying to Christ, “here I am, what would you have me be?” And then I can begin acting in that capacity. As I do what Christ would have me do, I will begin to meet my full potential. It feels very freeing to know that I no longer have to worry about my personality and how it might change. I know now that I can have a personality I can be proud of, instead of feeling doubt and shame. And when asked, I will know the answer to the question, “who am I?” A question which is much less important that knowing who I am becoming.