Chapter 1 - THE STORY OF UN BECOMING
THE STORY OF UN BECOMING
‘UN’-Becoming
And right then and there, each one of my colourful personalities came
up with a bunch of questions concerning my life’s journey. ‘Where are going’? ‘How far do we have to go/’
Are we there yet...?’ ‘How about now...?’
Don’t get me wrong. I know who
I am and am content with the knowledge of this.
However, where my life’s journey is taking me, remains unclear. Not to mention what am I supposed to ‘become’?
In search for the answers and determined to find more clarity on the
subject, I headed over to Mom and Dad’s house.
I planted myself at the massive table in the homey and sunny kitchen,
which had been one of my favourite, ‘pondering places’ and started mentally
making notes.
I don’t know how much time had passed as I sat there; absentmindedly flicking
through the pages of a dated Readers Digest magazine, probably printed around
the same time that I was born, when I noticed
the very promising, previously
illusive revelation, staring up at me from the pages. I couldn’t help but LOL (laugh out loud) at
its simplicity. This is what I discovered:
Perhaps the journey isn’t at all about
‘becoming’ anything really. Maybe it’s
about ‘UN’-Becoming everything that isn’t me!
Along my life journey I’ve met numerous individuals who managed to form
some (pretty illicit albeit mostly fascinating) preconceived ideas about the ME
they obviously just never understood. These
ideas would range from how I should behave to what I should and should not
do. And seemingly everyone, had an opinion as to where I could
have been by now, if only I had come back to earth from sticking my head in the
clouds, daydreaming, (little did they know that I had in fact, been strategically
planning my route to becoming all that I dreamt I could be - not simply daydreaming).
Dreams, I’d been told, were for when you are tucked up in bed and fast
asleep at night - (AHA...so that’s why it’s called dreamland!). How
ironic! Since as far back as I can
remember, we are continuously encouraged to, ‘follow your dreams’, ‘dream
big’ and, ‘if you can dream it, you can achieve it’. I was
told to start taking life seriously (did they really think I wasn’t?), and was
often asked, ‘Why can’t you just go with the flow like normal people do?’ Well, apparently, ‘because only dead fish go
with the flow’, was not the correct answer.
And that’s how I came to believe a lot of what had been said to and
about me. I started obsessing about
becoming something...I needed to become someone, and fast if I wanted to
be accepted and taken seriously. I tried
being ‘normal’, living a ‘normal’ life, and doing the normal (mundane) grown up
things that are expected from people my age.. They were the two worst days of my life!
Sadly, I had, over time, allowed the unreserved opinions’ of others to
latch onto me. And I started wearing all
the words spoken, jokes made, society’s suggestions of what is socially
acceptable, like a coat. And before
realising what was happening, this became my own need to be accepted and to
‘fit in’. I wore these ideals like a snug jacket that
was two sizes too small for me. Did
I become normal by doing these ‘normal’ things? No. Instead, I became even more unrecognisable,
even, or especially, to myself.
Fortunately
I came to my senses soon enough, with the help of a kitchen table, an old
Readers Digest magazine, and a mother who is an avid hoarder (or a collector of
things, as she would say). That is when I
made a promise to myself, to be the only ME I can be.
I’ve
come to understand that if I ‘UN’- Become all the ‘branded’ suggestions,
descriptions, labels and pre-determined expectations, I can just BE who I was
meant to be in the first place. I can be
the ME I was, before any worldly
inhabitants and whoever it is who makes the ‘humanity normality rules’, decided
I had to BE anything other than what and who I am.
So now,
and on that note, please excuse me, I have more ‘UN’- Becoming
to do, more dreams to chase, and much more magic to add to my ‘UN’-Became life.
