Who Am I? Owning Your Story

Part 1: Tell me about yourself….

Have you ever stepped into an interview only to receive the prompt: “So tell me about yourself?” Oof. That’s my internal response when I hear this question. Where to begin? What are they really trying to get at? Do they really want to know about me? Or do they want to know what I can do for them?

Depending on your personality, this question is either going to come as a pleasant surprise or a terrifying intrusion. The question is somewhat ambiguous when you think about it, at least it feels that way to me. Depending on the context of the job interview, they may want to know about past experiences, family or cultural context, learning style, and relationships. They may want to get a sense of whether they would like working with you. Or they may really want to know what experiences you bring that are unique and will provide their team with the assets they need as they consider whether or not to hire you. They probably don’t really want to know about your deepest thoughts, worries, or struggles or what you might think of as your inner self unless those things would impede your ability to do your job and get along with others.

In neuroscience, there are two different types of learning which Richie Davidson talked about during his podcast episode with Dr. Pam King—the first is declarative learning and the second is procedural. Declarative learning has to do with the things that we know–the facts we learn. Procedural learning is how we come to know something to be true–the experiences we have. The self is a very complex, contextualized concept. The self is highly relational, and in Christian contexts understood as the imago dei (the image of God), lovable and capable of giving love. But in popular culture, the self is often depicted as highly individualized. When you open your social media, the first thing you may see is a selfie. The selfie is the image we knowingly choose to let others see. The word selfie was officially added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2013 (the same year it was named word of the year). The selfie is the ideal and self-fabricated image of who we are that we want others to see. Just 25 years ago, the constructed selves that we commonly see on social media were things only seen in the context of movie stars and their images created by their publicists. The reality – whether you are a person of faith or not–is that your perception of yourself cannot be understood apart from your context because it developed within that context. Whether we are a part of the faith community or not, who we are and who we know ourselves to be cannot be understood independently from others. For better and for worse (at times), we are all a part of a larger story that connects us to one another.

Dwight Radcliffe, assistant professor of theology, mission and culture, shared his experience as a cisgender, black man working at a Christian Seminary in Pasadena, CA during a With & For S1 podcast episode. He shared that “to thrive is to live unencumbered.” Many of you might experience some fear when answering the question, “so tell me about yourself.” This fear could be due to the fact that you don’t have the ability to live unencumbered. Not everyone can embrace who they are in the contexts they find themselves without facing marginalization or resistance. There are social norms that prevent us from being, or bringing, our full, wholehearted expressions of our embodied selves into the spaces we occupy. Perhaps the self you want to describe is not the self that others can physically see. This could be due to whether or not you are able bodied, your race or ethnicity, your socioeconomic status, your sexuality, your gender, etc. There are a number of obstacles standing between us and our ability to live unencumbered. 

With this frame in mind, let’s go back to the interview. After a long pause, you gather your thoughts and you share a piece of your story. You share why you are in that particular place at that particular time. After sharing your thoughts, you may breathe a sigh of relief or feel some tension within yourself as you reflect on what you chose to share. Perhaps, if you don’t get the job, that’s an invitation to thrive somewhere else. Perhaps it’s a signpost that your full self would have been encumbered there. In which case, a closed door can be an opportunity to seek out a community that embraces you fully. While dreaming of living unencumbered might sound great at first thought, humans really can’t live unencumbered because ultimately we have to live with others and within systems. The encumbered life may be our hope, but it isn’t where we live. A thriving life happens when we learn that we are capable of being in reciprocal relationships with others. It happens when we acknowledge that we have just as much love to offer others as they have to offer us.

Part 2: Telling our life story…

To be ourselves, we have to acknowledge all of the factors that are working against us embracing our full selves. Who we are is not a destination, it is an ever-evolving, non-linear journey of discovery and becoming someone who can live wholeheartedly as a reciprocating self. To be able to speak to who we are, we have to know something about the people, places and experiences that shaped us.

Our love for each other is almost always expressed in an embodied way. We show love by showing up, being present, giving someone a hug (when it’s welcomed), patting a child on the back, or holding a loved one’s hand. We cannot separate our need for love and our capacity to give love from our experience in our bodies. This is not something that is unique to us at the Thrive Center. Research shows that people who have more consistent access to satisfying, consensual physical touch experience less loneliness and greater physiological well-being. Although the selfie has evolved into a meaning-making mechanism that can be used to show someone’s self-expression, it perpetuates an epidemic of loneliness that presents an ideal image of a disembodied self. The foundation of the selfie is that it is a photo of an individual, who is most commonly pictured alone. Yet, we were not created to be alone–we were created for rich and meaningful relationships that are embodied. This means that the selfie alone does not say much about someone’s identity. We have to come home to our bodies, as embodied beings, if we can fully embrace our belovedness.

Part of this coming home to self is learning to tell our story. Telling the story of our selfhood is a skill and an art. It is an opportunity to invite others to journey with you as you seek a deeper understanding of who you are within the context you find yourself in and as you grow into your life’s purposes. The narrative of the beloved is not a story of a single selfie; it is a narrative of a collection of selfies. It is the story of us. Community psychologists, liberation psychologists, and black psychologists all agree that the idea of self-care is limited by the belief that it is the sole responsibility of the individual to care for their well-being—the reality is that self-care is actually a communal endeavor. “Community care nourishes us all for the journey home.” Our story is not our own. We cannot change the families we are born into, but we can intentionally seek out secure and loving relationships as we develop and mature throughout our lives. These relationships can bolster self-confidence and contribute to our ability to thrive when they are nurturing our abilities and gifts. Choosing loving relationships requires insight and awareness into the ways we seek to relate and connect to others. Let’s start this journey together by taking an inventory of what we value and why. We invite you to explore our book list on identity and narrative. We hope it can be an invitation for you to come home to yourself, to give love to others and receive love in return. In other words, we invite you to tell your story and seek out spaces, people, places and experiences that encourage you to Thrive.

Self-Inventory 

1. Write down the first three things that come to mind when you think about yourself?
2. Now write down three more things that the first three prompted you to think about.
3. Do you see any common thread amongst these things?
4. Why do you think these things came to mind first?
5. Consider crafting some ideas about what self-care and community care might look like for you. Do you feel like self-care is something that you do well? 
   1. Does self-care make you feel uncomfortable? Does it feel too indulgent to care for yourself well?
   2.  What beliefs about yourself might help you embrace practices to care for yourself?
6. Your answers to the questions above can serve as a guide to further exploration of your own narrative and story. Consider inviting others to take this journey with you as you begin to come home to yourself.

Notes:

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5318418/

2. Based on a 9/30/23 ChatGPT query: “what are the key aspects of identity according to william damon”

3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7250541/

4.  Thema Bryant Davis, Homecoming, Ch.6, p. 84.

5.  Thema Bryant Davis, Homecoming, Ch.6, p. 85.

6.   Thema Bryant Davis, Homecoming, Ch.6, p. 107.