Who Are You Today, and Who Are You Wanting to Become?

Lately I have been thinking a great deal about the ways we create ourselves through the lives we live. How we experience and activate the “Artistic I,” as Antonio Mercurio called it: the part of ourselves that knows how to integrate contrasting feelings and experiences to nudge us toward ever fuller Being.

We are not simply born with a fully formed “true self” that we need to uncover. Even though our dreams and desires nudge us toward how we live our lives, new parts of ourselves can come into being through everything we experience — through love and loss, through the frustrations we face regarding those earliest dreams and desires and later ones as well, through our relationships, through the choices we make, through healing old wounds, and through gradually learning to reparent ourselves and recognize and respond with love to our own deepest needs.

Growth, from this perspective, is profoundly creative. It is not something that happens on its own; it requires our attention and our willingness to learn new ways of listening to ourselves and showing up for our own lives.

No one else can do this for us. And yet, when we decide to take ownership of our growth, we soon discover that we are not alone. Not only are there forces within us that are there to help, but we can begin to recognize that other people around us, too, are making their own efforts to grow — even though it may not always look that way to us.

As we become more conscious of the patterns that once shaped us automatically, we gain the possibility of responding differently to situations that are perplexing and painful, or even simply challenging — situations asking us to show up in new ways.

And each time we do, we participate in creating a self — and a life — that did not exist before.

How Life Continues to Create Us

This year has brought that home to me in very concrete ways.

I have welcomed two grandchildren into the world, and each new life has shifted something in me. The arrival of a new generation changes the family system, but it also changes us personally. It gives us a new relationship to continuity, to time, to mortality, to love, to vulnerability, and to the mystery of what will continue after us.

These children did not simply arrive into the life I already had. Their arrival has become part of what is creating me now. As someone who was adopted, seeing these tiny babies and their interactions with their parents, who are connected to me biologically, has allowed me to understand many aspects of my own story — something I have said I was going to be writing about, and I will! But integrating it all within my own mind and heart and soul is taking time. I myself only learned who my biological families are in 2018; it has only been eight years, just a fraction of my life, and… well, I am still letting it all settle and make sense.

Returning to Italy — But Not to the Past

And once again, I am preparing to return to Italy for an extended period.

Italy has always evoked very different dimensions of me than Wisconsin does. There are aspects of myself that seem to come alive there more easily — through the language, the great works of art, the natural beauty, the music, the food, the relationships, the landscape, the sea, and a different rhythm of daily life.

I “discovered” first Milan and then Calabria when I was a very young woman, in search of a way to belong to myself and my life that had been eluding me. When I first went there, I imagined it as being a kind of sabbatical year; instead, it turned into an entire chapter of my life, including a dual career as an English teacher and musician, eventually marriage and children, followed by a return to school to study humanistic psychology and, after more than ten years of arduous study and training, eventually become a counselor in Existential Personalistic Anthropology.

While there I established many important relationships, not only with friends and colleagues, but with the land and culture themselves. My life there profoundly changed me, in ways that are hard to describe. I never truly became “Italian,” even though I did gain citizenship after living there for 24 years, but I most definitely was no longer simply a woman from Wisconsin in the USA, either.

Like many people who end up living in another country, culture, or geographical area different from where they were born and raised, I have been forged by both realities. I am a little bit of each, and my task has increasingly become: how can I integrate the two realities in ways that can nurture me and perhaps inspire and encourage others, too?

I no longer think of my extended stays in Calabria as simply “reclaiming my Italian self.”

The woman who is returning to Italy now is not the woman who lived there twenty or thirty years ago. She has been shaped by everything that has happened since — by my return to live in Wisconsin, by work, relationships, loss, healing, family, creativity, disappointment, joy, and by all the choices that have slowly changed how I experience myself and the world.

What It Means to Honor Our Needs

There is beauty in this movement and in these choices, but there are challenges as well. Growth often asks us to reconsider structures that once worked for us, identities we became accustomed to, and ways of living that may no longer fit.

Being gone for extended periods means not only packing carefully but asking my husband to accept keeping the home fires burning for me as well — most certainly not an easy ask, and for him not an easy response, even though he has learned that by supporting my dreams he benefits as well (and I have done, and do, the same for him).

It means stepping out of the comfort of my daily routine and accepting quite a bit of discomfort while traveling and searching for the kinds of places I want to spend time in.

It means facing all kinds of fears and insecurities. I quite literally almost have a heart attack every time I am on a plane and it hits some turbulence! And even though I know the language and can navigate the normal unpredictability of travel with confidence, because I have traveled quite a bit in the course of my life, it is always fraught with moments of doubt, uncertainty, and no small amount of guilt for how much space I am taking all for myself, away from my family.

It also means carefully planning and managing my finances so I can be comfortable while respecting the limits of my pocketbook. No, I am not rich, and my travels are possible because I make them a priority throughout the year and watch both my income and expenditures very carefully.

This is something I have had to learn, painstakingly, through the years: that becoming more capable of recognizing our true needs also means becoming more responsible for how we respond to them.

And sometimes that requires real courage and real change.

When Life Calls Us to Change

The various moments of our lives offer us specific opportunities that, when we can respond to them with attention, lead us into new versions of ourselves in often very unexpected and wonderful ways.

But the hard thing is that these doorways we are called to walk through do not often open with simple, quiet whispers of the soul, gently beckoning us on! They may only become visible when we experience some kind of pain or are jolted awake by a challenging circumstance.

For me, my “nudges” to reestablish my Italian roots have come mostly through profound inner doubt and struggle. I was pretty sure I was done, settled, set for sitting back and calmly experiencing my older years without the hassle of long plane flights and hauling my guitar around!

But alas, Life has other plans for me….

And since I have been responding to its call to action, despite my fears and trepidation, I have again been feeling a liveliness I thought belonged only to my younger days.

Healing Opens New Possibilities

This is something I see often in the people I work with as well.

Healing is not simply about feeling better or resolving the past. It can open possibilities that did not exist before, and nudge us to make changes that at first glance seem really uncomfortable, difficult, or impossible.

But as we move forward, sometimes step by tiny step, we may become capable of relationships we could not once have sustained — first of all, a different relationship with ourselves — of setting limits we could not once have imagined setting, of creating work that is more meaningful, of tolerating greater intimacy or greater freedom, or simply of inhabiting our own lives in a different way.

Who Are You Becoming?

So perhaps the question is not only:

Who am I today?

But also:

Who am I wanting to become?

And perhaps most importantly:

What am I becoming capable of living now that I could not have experienced 10 or 20 years ago?

That question feels very alive for me at the moment.

Creating Ourselves, Creating Our World

It is also closely connected to the work I do in my individual sessions and in Family Constellations workshops. By becoming more conscious of the family patterns, loyalties, wounds, and survival strategies that have shaped us, we can begin to respond to life with greater freedom and creativity.

We are not simply discovering who we have always been.

We are participating in what we create next.

And as we become more active participants in creating our own lives, we also become participants in creating the world we live in.

Every relationship we approach with greater awareness, every old pattern we choose not to repeat, every act of courage, responsibility, creativity, and love becomes part of something larger than our individual lives.

The world we live in is continuously being created through the ways we live within it.

Perhaps that, too, is part of the invitation before us: not only to ask who we are becoming, but what kind of world we are helping to create through who we choose to become.