Who am I and why am I here? (And other existential questions about identity)
“So… what made you move to Shawnigan Lake?”
It’s one of the most common questions I get from people I encounter in the tiny village I moved to at the edge of a lake on Vancouver Island. “It was time for a change,” I say, or “I’ve been wandering since I sold my house in Winnipeg, and this felt like the next right thing,” or “My kids all grew up and moved away so I thought it was my turn for an adventure,” or “I wanted a place with gentler winters.”
Whenever I’m asked the question, I have to pause and ask myself “Why DID I move here? What was the truest impetus for this decision and how do I explain that to other people when I don’t quite understand it myself? How do I talk about gut feelings and a life-long draw toward the ocean and a longing to be among tall trees and deep moss? And are there things I’m not fully admitting to myself or that I don’t want to say out loud – like a desire to be in a different place than where much of my trauma lives?”
It’s not that I doubt my decision – far from it – I have rarely felt more at peace about a big life choice than I have about this one. I love it here. My body feels like she has found home. I’m sitting right now looking out at the tall cedar tree in the backyard of my new home and I feel like I have found new friends among the trees. It still feels rather exceptional, after years of parenting and marriage and place-based work and looking after the needs of other people that I got to make this choice purely motivated by my own pleasure and longing. It’s a special kind of privilege that I have and I don’t take that for granted.
But what gets me into an existential place with this question is a bigger one that I often grapple with… Can I ever truly KNOW myself? Can I ever truly know, without a shadow of a doubt, that a choice I’m making is rooted in my own identity and desire and isn’t tinged with obligation, trauma, fear, or social conditioning? Can I ever really see myself clearly enough that I know which biases, beliefs, baggage, or barriers are shaping the choices I make?
I suppose it’s a rather odd question, coming from someone who’s relaunching a course called “Know Yourself, Free Yourself” in just a few weeks, but if you’ve been following me for awhile, you probably know by now that I have never been a person of absolutes – a person who doesn’t continue to question and explore an idea even after she’s put it into writing. I have often joked that I wished my books could be published with Velcro pages so that I could change the ones that no longer fully reflect the evolution of my beliefs and worldview.
Yes, I’m teaching a course with “Know Yourself” in the title, but that’s not because I believe we can ever FULLY know ourselves or that we are ever meant to be static enough in our identity that knowing ourselves is a once-and-done accomplishment. Quite the opposite – I believe that self-awareness is a life-long quest, and not something you can ever complete in an 8-week course. (Perhaps I should have called the course “Explore Yourself, Free Yourself”.)
As I said in the last post, I think identity is a rather slippery thing, and that’s okay with me. I don’t need it to be static. There are very few things that I feel like I need to know with 100% certainty anymore. Except when my nervous system is particularly activated and it feels like certainty would give me some measure of safety, I have mostly become quite accepting of ambiguity and liminality. Even when I make big decisions, like moving to an island 2400 kilometres from where I lived most of my life, I’m okay with a “good enough” understanding of why I made the choice.
There is still much to explore about who I am. I don’t fully know what I believe, for example, especially when it comes to faith and religion. I grew up with a narrow understanding of what faith was supposed to look like, and with regular reminders that if I didn’t have that particular kind of faith, I would suffer the punishment of hell. It took me a long time to work through the fear that that kind of teaching instilled in me (which I wrote more about in my book, Where Tenderness Lives), and when I finally realized it wasn’t a faith that felt alive in me anymore, I spent years trying to figure out what I actually DO believe. I haven’t let go of a belief that there is a loving divine who’s looking out for me, but now I more frequently use words like Mystery and Tenderness and that fits me better than the language of “God” (especially the male version of that terminology). But is there a tangible belief at the heart of this that I can claim and define? Not really – it feels different nearly every day. Much of it is rooted in a relationship with nature, but that doesn’t mean I’ve fully embraced language like “animism” or “wiccan”.
I also don’t fully know where I stand when it comes to my own gender and sexuality. I use she/her pronouns, and I’ve come out as queer (which I also wrote about in my newest book), but it still feels kind of fuzzy to me. Mostly I feel more attracted to women than to men, but it doesn’t feel definitive the way it seems to for some people (especially since I could also imagine myself with a non-binary or trans person anywhere on the spectrum). What’s the terminology for that, and… does it matter? I would defend the right of anyone who feels more certain than I about their sexual/gender identity (especially if it means they have to fight against transphobia to be their truest selves), but that doesn’t mean I can find that kind of certainty in my own body.
Beyond sexuality, there are many, many things I have yet to learn about my body. I get stuck in my head a lot and it’s only been in recent years that I started to pay more attention to what my body needs or what she is trying to communicate to me. Old habits die hard and so I still ignore many signals and forget to take care of myself. Sometimes I’m surprised to discover, years after something starts showing up in my body, that it’s related to a transition my body is going through (like menopause) or a past event.
In all of these cases – faith, sexuality and embodiment – I’ve experienced trauma that’s shaped the way I show up in the world, so… again, I don’t know what’s fully ME and what is a trauma imprint left in my body. Which leaves me wondering… is there any way to separate the two? Is there actually a version of identity, for any of us, that is not at least somewhat trauma-shaped. We are each an amalgamation of both our DNA and all of the experiences we’ve had in our lives, plus our DNA holds trauma from the lineage that came before us. In other words, it’s probably most true that trauma healing isn’t about reverting back to some magical pre-trauma state, but about learning the most healthy adaptation that allows the trauma-imprint to live in our bodies without causing further harm.
So maybe the best we can do is not to ever expect to KNOW ourselves, but to commit ourselves to a lifelong exploration of who we’ve become AND to allow ourselves to continue to evolve and shape-shift to meet the life ahead of us.
Which brings me back to my course, Know Yourself, Free Yourself. When I think of the impetus for creating the course, it’s less about trying to find certainty about our identity than it is about learning to be more at peace with the uncertainty, learning to see things about ourselves that might keep us bound to old narratives, and learning to find freedom so that we can continue to evolve instead of being held back by things like trauma, social conditioning, and the systems that oppress us.
It’s true that I will likely never fully know myself, but I will NEVER regret the quest to find out more about who I am, what (and who) I love, what shaped me, what limits me, what brings me delight, and what makes my body feel the most alive, safe and free. And I will never regret the depths I’ve gone to understand the shaping of a human – things like trauma, social conditioning, oppression, mental health, family systems, belief systems, and the way a human nervous system works. And, more than anything, I will never regret what it took to find the courage to step away from some of those old narratives that kept me in a box and claim my right to be someone other than the identity I once felt confined to.
Every step of this quest has been worthwhile, and it’s brought me here, to this little village at the edge of a lake on an island at the edge of a big country – a place where I feel deep joy and liberation and safety in my body, and a place where I don’t need to pretend to be someone I’m not.
Allow me to (re)introduce myself to you… My name is Heather. I live in Shawnigan Lake on Vancouver Island because I leaned into a desire that brought me toward the ocean and the tall trees. It’s also true that I wanted to see what it felt like for my body to live in a different city from where I experienced most of my trauma. I am a spiritual person, but my faith is liminal and not easy to define. I am queer, but I don’t entirely know how to define that either – just that my body lives in the liminal spaces of gender and sexuality. I keep evolving, so the things that were true of me last year might not be entirely true this year. I started liking coffee and the smell of lavender last year – both of which seem like strange things to start at the age of 56, but I’m okay with that. I have an adventurous spirit and I like to explore both my inner landscape and the landscape that lives outside of my body. I wrote two books that I’m proud of, but I’ll need to keep writing new books because the ideas I’ve put into words in the past may not be sufficient for the ways I’ll view the world (and myself) in the future.
I am pleased to meet you! What do you know about yourself?