When I Grow Up
What do you want to be when you grow up?
It’s the first question we’re asked as children. Our answer is a great revealer of secrets; the soul is laid bare and the deepest desires of our little hearts are exposed to the light of day. I’m told I used to say, “I want to be a snail,” but thankfully, that has changed with time.
Now I want to be a television actor, living in Greenwich Village and outwitting the paparazzi. I want to be an eccentric, bohemian novelist or one of the great lovers. Mostly, I want to be widely known and adored. I don’t care about the money or fame – it’s the love and significance I’m after. To be deeply loved by many people and appreciated for my important and long-lasting impact on the world.
Of course, there is an enormous gap between who I am and who I want to be. I am neither a widely known nor significant player in the cultural landscape. Every waking moment, I view myself in light of this gap.
I am a failure. I have failed fantastically as an actor, having lasted five weeks in Hollywood and seventeen days in New York City. I have failed fantastically as a writer, having never been published in even a local magazine. I haven’t been on a date in twenty-six years. I’m not particularly fun to be around, given a propensity to pseudo-intellectual overthinking and dark moodiness, periodically punctuated with manic, slapstick performance art. I’m a lonely, aging nonentity whose inability to live up to my own ambition has left me cynical and disillusioned. This sounds like an absurdly overblown pity party, but this is how I view myself.
The paragraph above is true in its own way, but it is incomplete; who I am is not defined by my failures. Nor would I be defined by my achievements, assuming I had those. Even if I was a card-carrying resident of Mount Olympus alongside such luminaries as Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe, it would not bring the meaning to my life I imagine. Significance is a notoriously unreliable measuring stick. We can never know who will live on in mythology and who will not. Big names are forgotten, and forgotten names remembered and there’s precious little we can do about it. Besides, from a cosmic perspective, the difference in significance between the President of the United States and a Bolivian peasant is probably a wash.
When I think of myself in relation to my ambition, I have a warped view of self, and as any therapist will tell you, this has far-reaching consequences. How should we think of ourselves, instead? When we look in the mirror, how do we evaluate the person looking back?
It’s common in America to define ourselves by what we do for a day job. “So what do you do?” is the first question we are now asked, as if the answer will reveal all there is to know. But employment is just one ingredient in our lives, and is always susceptible to change.
We may be many things at any given time: young, funny, talented, single, fit. We receive validation or criticism for these things, and it’s easy to define ourselves by them. But none of these are permanent, and we will always be disappointed if we make them the source of our identity. Everything we know is transience and uncertainty, constantly changing on us like the clouds.
Our Creator is the only thing big and permanent enough to which we can attach ourselves. Just as a painting is known and valued in relation to its painter, so we can only be known in light of our Creator.
When asked who we are, humans always point to something outside of ourselves: I am Irish, I am a parent, or a mechanic. But when asked who He was, God looked around and saw nothing bigger or even similar, so He simply answered, “I Am.” There is a solidity and stillness to Him. He is the Source, the unmoved Mover, irreducible, the Beginning and the End.
He knows me better than I know myself; He knows why I am here and what my purpose is in the greater Story. I am not defined by my relationship to other humans, but by my relationship to God. And He has called me His son. A child of God – this is who I am. This is how I am to think of myself. I don’t get to decide who I am any more, or seek to define myself by lesser things like accomplishments, vocation, or status. I am His.
So what do I want to be when I grow up?
More like Jesus.
J.
July 20, 2021