Who am I, really?
NATURE AND NURTURE. Who we are is a unique combination of DNA and experience. Nature and nurture if you like. Our physical appearance (I’m tall, have brown eyes etc), our social and work roles ( I’m a mother, I’m a manager, etc), our personal traits (I’m talkative, I worry a lot), our culture (I'm Jewish, I'm Fijian) and our experiences (I grew up in the country, I left school very young, I was the youngest of five etc) all impact our sense of who we are.
A JOURNEY INTO YOURSELF.
Discovering who we are is one thing, and then consistently being our real deal is another. And neither is easy. Made harder by the fact that our self is ever changing. The self we were in our earliest memory is a very different person than the one reading this today. Certainly none of the cells are still there, they have all been replaced many times over. Yet the way we see ourselves has changed dramatically over the years. If you’ve ever gone back to read your old teenage diary, or a letter to a first love, you’ll wonder who the writer was, and the more years that have passed since the writing, the more distant the connection. i We grow up with our family's ways of being real. Our own unique ways of dealing with joy, fun, sadness, fear and conflict. And we find our own brand of quirkiness. m
OUR SENSE OF SELF. Our sense of self is deeply influenced by any mismatch between how we see ourselves, and how we would like to be (I wish I was taller, more outgoing, a faster runner, better at maths, more assertive and so on endlessly) and our impetus for attainment of those ideals. unique self. There’s no need to be anybody else. We chose you. So be you. Be your wonderful
44 | TWO: PEOPLE WANT THE REAL DEAL
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