Who Am I?

As of this week, I am twenty-five years old. I’ve spent a lot of time this week reflecting on who I am and who I am becoming. I’ve grown an awful lot in my first quarter-century of life. It was more obvious when I was younger, of course, but since graduating college, I think I’ve changed an extraordinary amount. I’m no longer a fresh-faced college graduate. But who, exactly, am I?

There is, of course, no simple answer to this question. There are a hundred different “me”s, a hundred different combinations of mood and personality and circumstance and choice that moment-by-moment make me myself, and a hundred more ways of dividing them out. But there are two Laurens in particular that I want to talk about today.

The first Lauren is amazing. She’s mature. She knows where she’s going. She’s focused and compassionate, hardworking and adventurous. She’s calm in the face of chaos and efficient in the face of pressure. She sees into other people’s lives and reaches out to touch them. She sees the beauty and hope of the world and tries to bring it to others. She’s fantastic.

Then there’s the other Lauren. The Lauren that gets frightened and lonely and just wants to be done with everything. The Lauren who likes to eat way too much chocolate and binge-watch Netflix when she’s stressed, who under pressure tends to worry only about herself. The Lauren who collapses in tears at things that don’t seem like they should be that big a deal, who all too often feels like a little girl blundering around this big world, making a fool of herself.

Sometimes I feel like the first Lauren – usually when I’m at the top of the mountain and have room to breathe. Much more often, when some unexpected obstacle shows up, I feel like the second version. When I’m at the bottom of the mountain looking up, it seems like the first Lauren was only an illusion all along. The second version is the real one; it was only wishful thinking to hope otherwise.

But the truth is, this has nothing to do with wishing and everything to do with choice. With every day, every obstacle, every task, every conversation, I choose which version of myself I want to turn into, and I practice being her. And that’s why I have to do hard things – because otherwise, how could I become her?

I took my parents’ dog running earlier this week. There’s a decent-size hill near our house that he positively adores sprinting down. But what he doesn’t understand about hills, is that in order to sprint down a hill, you first have to go up it. We were a couple miles in, and he did not want to start going uphill. He trotted along reluctantly behind me, stopping at every mailbox to sniff. Until finally we were at the top of the hill, ready to turn around – and we sprinted home.

As I pulled him up that hill, I couldn’t help but think he reminded me of myself. How many times, on starting yet another hill, have I whined about it? I pull back, and plot reluctantly along, and dally at every stopping-point, and try to turn around, and God just keeps coaxing me along. Because he knows what I keep forgetting – that in order to have that final sprint home, we have to get to the top of this hill. And in the end, I come out stronger for it.

I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one staring up at a hill right now and wondering how hard the climb is going to be. But we’re going to make it, everyone. Sooner than we think, we’ll be sprinting home.

“mountain” by barnyz is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0