Ever been hit with a question that just completely makes you take a look at yourself and wonder exactly what the answer just might be? I think I have, and I am wondering where things are going. For the ingenious reader who is already trying to figure out this post and get ahead of the game, no, the question isn’t “who am I?”, but it prompted that response. I was recently reading someone’s blog, and they posed the thought that they would not know who they are until they discovered themselves. The question is, do we all know who we are? I know exactly who I want to be, I know what I strive to be, what I wish I could be, what I know I can’t be, and what I dream at night to be, but those are all states other than who I am. The only real and acurate judge of who you are, is what other people say about you. And honestly, people aren’t going to tell you the truth about you, to you. So what do we do to figure out who we are? I have no clue, but a guess maybe.

I learned in Business Leadership that to bring out the values in someone, you have to create a crisis. This can be a simple situation, remove someone’s stapler and see what they do. When they need a stapler, do they go looking for their own, borrow someone else’s, claim someone stole theirs, what action do they take? More than likely, this is the same action they would take if something larger came up missing. So is the answer that we create conflict in our life, a crisis to test our inner self? I think we all go through enough crisis in our lives to not need an extra “just for fun” one thrown in. But we should look at the crisis that is in our life. I’ll use myself for an example, and I am going to get pretty deep and reveal some of my own inner workings as I feel they are, and have discovered them to be so far.

I am deathly afraid of being alone. Not the, “It’s dark and no one is around” alone, but the “I have no one in my life to share everyday with” alone. Now yes, most people are afraid of being alone, but I feel that lack quite keenly in myself. I’ve written in earlier posts that I believe our lives are defined by who we share them with. I’m not the type of person that can busy myself with putting work first, or a hobby, or this, or that. Along with this fear of being alone, I have a fear of not being successful. I have high aspirations for my life, and so far I have been able to manage, but someday soon I am going to really have to start playing hardball in the big leagues to do exactly what I want, and I am afraid that I may not be up to the challenge. I make a lot of expectations for my life, and sometimes I think my attitude makes others make expectations and I am afraid that I won’t meet them.

Now these are just two of the things I face, that I am afraid of, the conflict in my life. Yah, makes me look kinda sad and pathetic, but this is what I deal with. What can I learn from myself about these things once I get completely honest about them to myself? One, that I worry too much. I am missing life today because I am worried about what tomorrow might bring. Am I saying that you shouldn’t worry about tomorrow? Of course you should, but do not miss today because tomorrow is on your mind. I need to take my own advice, it would seem. Because of my fears and my worries, I have created in myself and attitude that seeks achievement in both of those areas, and when I don’t make achievements, I get upset, down, depressed, trodden upon. When my life stalls, fails to make progress, I question what I am doing wrong, what things I can change to keep pressing forward to the goal. Maybe I don’t even understand what the goal is. Maybe I have the goal all wrong. I don’t know. I have no answers, just more questions.