Validated Wholly.

You will all excuse me while I silently freak out about compromising my highly valued privacy in today's blogpost. This post is in some ways a revisit to another post I wrote, that has been one of the most popular entries in the history of Rantings. I'm here to talk about how we as humans can become caught up in what I like to call identity by comparison. In psychology, there are loads of studies that talk about elements that impact the way a person assembles their view of self - what parents say/do, what their peers do, what society says people like person/group X does, and what is inherent to the individual (their nature) all form a person's identity.

Recently, I've been thinking about my own identity and the parts of that identity that I don't need to own. In my theory, there are at least a couple sources of identity in every individual. The first is the true core and essence of you, the values, hopes and preferences that make you, you. The second is the identity that someone gave you. This is what your parent, a teacher, a mean boy/girl at school, a boyfriend/girlfriend made as a statement about you, that you have taken ownership of. This is what you believe about yourself, solely based on what you were told.  Now, it isn't necessarily bad, and we're going to talk about how, as one of the good examples of this, God also gives us an identity, one that we can only own through faith. In my opinion when your true core identity can find the truth and the words that resonate from what people have said, and still be fully represented, then you have found your ideal self. This is the identity that Rantings sets out to encourage you to seek and live by, because it represents you after you have sifted through what you've been taught, and is what you truly believe.

This morning, I went to my parents' church for fellowship Sunday and in their special "Thanksgiving Service," I gave my testimony. I related what has been going on with me, and I said that in some ways, I am still living in one of my worst nightmares, but the thanksgiving can come now, because I am completely, 100% convinced that God is with me, and that He has a plan to use this for good. I have no dwindling in the faith department, only in the confidence department, but I remain sure that God is present, and somehow, in this He has neither left, nor forsaken me. I can see that He has not, so I can stay on the current course, without wavering, even when people suggest to me that I try an alternative.

Now, into the topic of the day. Who am I? I was freaking out earlier, because it is impressed upon me to drop the general nature of my posts. I am professing that there will always be a piece of myself in EVERY post I publish; not just in the way the writing is assembled, or the humour, but a direct insight from my heart on what I'm writing about. Today I am going to insert some self into my thoughts on singleness and some of the processes I've had to have on the matter in order to move to a more healthy place. I asked the who am I question because I want you to think about the statement answers you have to that question. For me, one of the answers I had, based on what the world told me about it, was that I was alone, and that alone wasn't quite right.

When I entered my mid-twenties, it hit me like a ton of bricks, bricks that "they" had said were looming over my head, but that I had always assumed were never going to be my problem. I finished gradschool and immediately realised that I was in the majority - I wanted the cliché in it's entirety; husband, 2.5 children, and white picket fence. This was a strange place to move into, because I had prided myself on my independence and my career driven ambition. I never really factored in a very persistent, present desire for a husband and family that would, at times, supersede my professional ambition.  I knew that I wanted to get married, but I saw this as a natural progression, a bi-product of my living.

When the desire for a spouse and a family became an entity of its own, somehow morphing into a full fledged goal in my twenties (adding an Mrs. degree to my Ms. and my future PhD. ambitions) I began to feel nervous, because the world categorises people into these rigid subgroups, and I was contemplating where I fit into these. Was I a single career woman like I'd kind of been marketed as up to that point? Was I in a relationship? Well, don't I want to get married? I'm past 25, and by some standards, withering as we speak! Was I one of those lesbians then? What steps was I taking to make this pesky singleness go away?

Those are the types of questions, implied or voiced, that I felt my world asking me. I felt a great deal of pressure, all of a sudden, and some of it was from my own internal dialogue. I took the commentary of the world around me about the identities I had to choose from, I considered my own heart's desire and then I came up with a belief about myself, based on these. I was single for too long. Something is wrong with me. I am going to be alone forever if I keep doing everything that I am doing now. I'm too picky. My standards are too high.

There are a number of reasons why we believe the things we do, anything from what someone was able to convince us of, to the actual details of our lives that have supported some theory in our heads. I realised about six months to a year ago that I was starting to believe those statements about myself, based on what my world was saying to me. That was an area of vulnerability for me, because I wasn't completely confident, and assured of my path or my future in this area. Number one, this particular identity directly involved another person (my future spouse) choosing me and therefore acknowledging my identity as a wife, and children, forcing all to acknowledge me as a mother. Secondly, I wanted these things, and didn't have them, had no known coming or existent suggestion that they would, in fact, be a part of my future. Now some people can just put this out of their mind and not worry about it, but I wasn't one of those people. For me, I feared that if I wasn't expressing the identity that I wanted, then I had to choose from the other identities that my world offered in this regard. I was in misery attempting to do this.

At some point, my prayers rotated from the hope to see these things come to pass, to indignant comments at God that this is how the world saw me, and I have no power to change that image. I felt like God taught me an important lesson through this struggle, though. The question came to me during one of these rants as to why I felt that these were my only choices. Who does God say I am? Does He call me alone, deviant, or withered? Also, is there any other area in my life where I let the world have this much commentary on who I am? Do I accept what the world tells me I can have? Or, do I usually teach the world about what it can do and have? Am I innovative or compliant? I realised that my life's philosophy was one of innovation, but somehow in this area, the devil was able to convince me that I needed to comply. I wanted to be a mother, and I felt the question raised in one of my rant moments with God of why not be a mother, then? There are many people already in the world who need a mother's love, so why wait until I feel validated by society to express that trait? Who are these people anyway?

I dissected my thoughts about womanhood, and questioned myself on why I felt as though my feminine identity was tied into my relationship status. I realised that the world had told me that these were related things. Now, because I had an insecurity in this area, I walked around thinking that your femininity was  voided if you weren't being validated in a relationship. I had this idea that you needed another to confirm your identity as a woman before it was truly yours. Why? For me, it may have been because as a child I was a tomboy, and not very classically feminine at all, but somewhere in my early twenties I realised (with a vengeance) that I didn't want to be viewed as anything other than a woman. I worried that I wasn't being seen that way because the world was saying "you're not very womanly if you're single" and I began to despair because I wondered how I could express myself as womanly in this world when I have never been the type of person who could be in a relationship just for the sake of it, or even for fear of being alone.

And so, in my personal reflection and my conversations with God, the flaws in my thinking emerged. My identity was being too much affected by what others were speaking over me. Even if I didn't believe the negative statements, I felt the weight of them, and despaired over the minute they would become more than mean or hurtful things that someone said, but actual truths in my life. I acknowledged my belief that we are authors in this world. I believe that people speak into our lives, but that there is a life inside of us that others do not have any authority over. I believe that there is  purpose in the dream identity we each hold for ourselves, and the only person who can take that away from us is, you guessed it, us. What that means is that as an individual, you need boldness to argue for your own hope and vision, you need the strength to say I heard the world say one thing, but this is what I believe. More importantly, in my most honest relationship, the one with El Roi, God Who sees me, there is no mystery to the desires of my heart, and there is no judgement for the shape that my walk through the earth takes, certainly not in the case of my obedience to His mandates.

Psalm 119:1-8

The Message (MSG)

You're blessed when you stay on course, walking steadily on the road revealed by God. 

   You're blessed when you follow his directions,
      doing your best to find him.
   That's right—you don't go off on your own;
      you walk straight along the road he set.
   You, God, prescribed the right way to live;
      now you expect us to live it.
   Oh, that my steps might be steady,
      keeping to the course you set;
   Then I'd never have any regrets
      in comparing my life with your counsel.
   I thank you for speaking straight from your heart;
      I learn the pattern of your righteous ways.
   I'm going to do what you tell me to do;
      don't ever walk off and leave me.

I might not express every element of myself the way that I had in mind originally, but to know that there is at least One who sees me fully, loves me the same and is solely interested in good plans for me is my refuge in a world that doesn't always acknowledge my identity. God is our validation, and I understand that as long as we walk in obedience to Him, everything that we desire to be is validated in Him.