Guest Blog Post by Nicole McGrath -- Who Am I?

“Who am I?” is the plaintive cry I used to put out into the world at least every other week.  I struggled to identify my roots, my sense of belonging to a family, to feeling connected and loved.  I felt alone, isolated and misunderstood.  I constantly wondered who I was and despaired that I would ever work it out.  

I had searched for, found and met my birth mother by the time I was 14 years old.  I hated being adopted and loathed not knowing who I was.  I thought if I met her, I would have a definitive answer to who I was.  As if, in the imagined instant of gazing upon her, a knowing would be bestowed upon me that would vanquish all my uncertainty and I would be miraculously whole.  After I met her, I knew who had given birth to me and that I had no family history of heart attacks, but I still didn’t know who I was.  

I met my birth father when I was 22.  After meeting him I knew where my dark hair and eyes came from and that he had wanted to keep and raise me but I still didn’t know who I was.    

I know what I do for a living, what type of ice-cream I like, that chewing gum and spitting are two of my pet hates.  I know that I am a mother, a girlfriend, an adoptive sister, a half-sister, a daughter, a colleague and a friend.  I know the roles and functions I fill in the world but at the very centre of my being, what is there?  It feels like a void.  Who am I? 

I periodically take those personality-type indicator tests.  I limp through them, guessing answers about myself, telling myself it is ridiculous but unable to stop.  One of the questions should be, ‘Do you find it almost impossible to complete these questions?’  Strongly agree.  Each time, I hope they will give me an answer I can hang my hat on, a reassurance that, having followed the rules and answered the questions, the result will tell me that I am like millions of others in the world, sharing the same preferences for being alone, for not liking big parties, for being good at strategising.  I hope it will tell me who I am.  It never does and the answer always feels off the mark anyway.   I have taken the exact same test again immediately after finishing the first to see if I will get a different result, which I often I do.  If even a pseudo-scientific test can’t work out who I am, am I lost to myself forever?

I believe ‘Who am I?’ is a universal cry into the darkness, not just the lament of adoptees.   Literature teems with the question, poets, artists and philosophers have asked it for millennia and still no one seems to have the answer.  In 1637 Descartes said “I think therefore I am” but he didn’t say who he was and he’s been disagreed with a lot since then.  Surely if we’d figured it out, we’d have stopped asking the question by now?

So I wondered then if perhaps we were not asking ourselves the right question.  What if the question is not who we are, but who we are not?  

Who am I?  

Why am I here?  

What is my purpose?

This is a mantra I use in meditation.  The point of reciting it is that it should release the focus on the thoughts that besiege my brain and let my mind empty.  I’m not supposed to answer the questions directly, rather notice whatever fleeting thoughts occur and gently let them go.  I know, right?  But it works.  And interestingly, the answers do arrive.  For me, they are almost always this:

Who am I?  I know who I am not.

Why am I here? I am an exquisite part of creation.

What is my purpose? To shine.

These are hard things.  Hard to accept, to hold onto and to live, but they make not knowing who I am bearable. 

If knowing who I am is an impossible task, I learn each day who I am not and as this knowledge grows, so does my sense of self.  I am not judgemental, selfish, unkind, mean, ugly in person or spirit, lacking empathy, quick to blame, vengeful, bitter, hateful, harsh, uncaring, a quitter or without value.  There are more and they continue to slowly accumulate, giving me a sense of myself I’ve never had before.  

Of course, it pains me to admit that I have all these feelings but they are not who I am.  I am not judgemental was tricky.  Standing in judgement of other people is one of my go-to emotions.  It took me a while to work out that I do it when I feel at my most worthless because it deflects my feelings of inadequacy by allowing me to feel superior to someone else who I’ve deemed too pushy, too fat, too self-important, too loud or too fake.  It’s not pretty and I’m not proud of it but I’ve learnt why it comes up and I’ve also learnt to be kind but firm with myself.  When a judgemental thought stomps through my brain, and stomp through they do, I remind myself that I’m not mean, that I am safe and loved and I let the thought go.  I make sure to monitor what comes out of my mouth.  On good days, I can summon a kind thought to replace the judgemental one and mean it.  

I’m not selfish was another part of who I am not that took work.  I can behave in ways that are incredibly selfish because I’m terrified of scarcity; of not having enough food, people, towels or love.  But I get better at being less selfish.  I am safe, I have enough, I am loved.  Of course I’m still selfish on more occasions than I would like to admit, but I know when I’m doing it, I know why I’m doing it and so I’m kinder to myself.  I remind myself to relax my grip, to be generous and that whilst I may behave selfishly, I’m not a selfish person.  

Why am I here?  I have contemplated this when in the deepest, darkest pit of despair and truly wondered why.  I could just as easily have been an abortion as adopted.  But here I am, with the life experiences I have accumulated and the body I am in.  I’m not entirely certain what the purpose is to my being here but I do believe there is a higher spiritual power and I aspire to be close to it.  

Accepting that I am an exquisite part of creation is difficult work because I have believed for so long that I am unlovable.  Across humanity our beginnings are all different; mine may be worse than others but infinitely better than some and yet here we all are, inextricably connected like part of a web spun across the universe.  I believe I am not solely shaped by my beginning, that however I am, whoever I am, I am part of something greater than myself.  I’m here because I deserve to be here as much as a blade of grass, a spring lamb or a mountain range and if every part of creation is perfect, then so am I.  As I am.  

It’s equally difficult to know my purpose.  I have long berated myself that I don’t have an answer to whether I should have some grandiose and lofty purpose to fulfil.  Am I reaching my potential?  How can I do better?  What is my life calling?  Right now, the only thing I know for certain is that I need to write my story but I don’t yet know if this is my purpose.  Maybe I’ll know once it’s done or maybe not.  For right now, my only responsibility as a perfect part of creation is to shine.  To be the best version of myself I can be.  For me, that means trying to understand how I can be kinder, more generous and more connected, to myself and to others.  How I can love better and let myself be loved.  It means accepting that I am flawed and that my flaws are part of the perfection.  Believing that I am exactly where I need to be right now and not giving up.  It means committing to growth, to becoming more wholly alive and loving and to being of service.  I struggle to be of service because my feelings of unworthiness often prevent me believing anyone would want me to help or contribute to anything, but thinking and behaving this way deprives the world of my generosity and my humanness, so I try harder to give and grow, even when it’s uncomfortable.  I try harder to shine and I keep doing the work.  

I don’t know who I am and I have given up trying to find out because it boggles my mind.  What I do know is who I am not and the longer I stay on this path the clearer it becomes.   I am not unwanted.  I am not garbage.  I am not empty.  I am not unworthy.  I am not unlovable.  

Shine.