Do you ever feel like a walking schizo? I do. Sometimes I feel so disingenuous, like the person I am much of the time, my public face, is such a shallow representation of who I really am.
We are trained from an early age to adopt an alter ego. Our Clark Kent mode. Because our modern world is not made for authenticity. The naked soul is a stranger, and alien, in this place. We are bombarded with images of perfection and unrealistic expectations of who we are supposed to be, what we are supposed to achieve, and what makes us significant. Our Core Identity is skittish and spends its time in hiding. Meanwhile, we live our lives inside our Covering.
The Covering is the Shell Identity. It’s our husk. It’s the layers of social conditioning, of defense mechanisms, and whatever other psych-babble terminology to describe the concept that the average human being walks around every day of their lives completely guarded, full of crap really , and unable to admit it. The irony? That everyone else walking around is also completely full of crap. And we spend so much time and energy as a society trying to convince other people that we have it all together, because they have spent all their time convincing us they have it all together. We think they are being real, even though somewhere inside we know that no one could really have it that together, and we fake it so that they will think we are being real. It’s a perpetual cycle that we should have left behind when we graduated high school, but somehow still dominates the “real world.”
It would be so much easiser and way more productive if we could all just admit that we are full of crap, that our external identity is a generally a lie, and that our internal identity is who we really are, and rarely sees the light of day. Then, we can really begin to make some progress in getting to where we really want to go in life. The challenge is that it’s totally unrealistic to expect that we can just suddenly tear off the Covering, and live from the Core.
First of all, it takes time to abandon something that feels so comfortable. There is a reason we hide our Core identity, and live inside the Covering. We’ve been injured, we’ve been betrayed, we’ve been (fill in the blank). We think it is just too dangerous to show our true selves to everyone we meet. But what if that is what this world desperately needs? What if this world is simply waiting for real people to show up. People who have wrestled with who they are, and have discovered what they are really called to do in this world, and have the audacity to attempt to live it out.
Second, we have to figure out who we really are at our Core first before we can start living from the Core. Otherwise, we are just pulling back one layer of the onion, rather than penetrating to the essence of our being. Our souls were not blank slates when we were born, waiting to be written on by circumstances, experiences, and other people. Our souls were already written on by our Creator. We have a unique identity and calling, and it is tattooed somewhere deep inside of us. Or, maybe it was Etch-A-Sketched inside of us, and the turbulence of life erased it, and we’ve let other people get a hold of those knobs and try and redraw it.
Ok, so I teeter between making very interesting analogies, and very cheesy ones. Not sure where the Etch-A-Sketch one fits.
But here’s the point: We have to cast off our Covering, and recover our Core Identity. It is essential if we ever want to live a life that is congruent with the life that God has in mind for us.
This is Day 2 of the 100 Day Challenge.
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