Who the heck am I?

I remember the first time a mentor advised me to just be myself. I was a teen at the time and that was the most foreign statement I could have imagined. Who is me? What would being myself look like? All I had to go on was feedback from outside sources. Sometimes I would hear comments like "you're funny" or "you're bitchy" or worst of all "you're weird". Which was it? Perhaps it was a combination, maybe sometimes I was funny, sometimes I was bitchy and sometimes I was weird. I looked at my parents and siblings and thought maybe I'm just like one of them. That would make sense.
I honestly didn't know how to read myself. Some things I liked just because other people liked them. My personality had formed thus far purely out of a desire to be accepted, which was very conflicting depending on with whom I was interacting. It would still be years before there even was a me to be.

We are all born a relatively blank sheet. There are some elements of genetics existing, but the nurture part of our journey is wide open. We depend on others, for a large part of our lives, to provide us with the traits we will carry to the end of the journey, to tell us who we are. They provide us with feedback that is from their prospective or quite possibly dishonest, they use body language, which is once again not completely reliable, and they behave their message to us, which may have a hidden agenda. There is no limit to the contribution that the people in our environment can make to our self perception. Just think of it this way, everyone in our lives has paints and a paint brush and they paint on that blank canvas for years. One day we stand back to take account of who we are and gaze at this mess. Smears of colour and abstract shapes, it likely isn't a very pretty picture with such a wide variety of artists contributing to it. Some of us may be very lucky in that the artists worked together and had a plan for the piece, but that is rare. There was likely an array of emotionally blocked, bitter and maybe even drunk artists working our portrait when the others weren't even looking. How could our portrait have turned out to be beautiful?

By the time we have an opportunity to unveil the artwork, we would have developed enough awareness to know what should be on that canvas. Who would you have liked to become? Who have you met in your journey that you would most wish to be like? Take a little bit of each technique and each colour from peices that you love to begin to repaint your portrait. It can be done. Many famous works of art hanging in museums actually started out as something else. We now possess modern technology to see what is beneath the finished piece. When the artist wasn't satisfied with how the portrait was forming, he simply painted over it to create an entirely different picture. There are options. We are not obligated to hang the portrait as other people have painted it. We can paint whatever we like on the canvas. It is, after all, our canvas.

Think of this the next time someone suggests that you just be yourself...you choose.