Losing my self

Somewhere between throwing my college graduation hat in the air and entering the library where I currently sit I lost my self. It's like the time I got pulled over by a screaming policeman who asked for my id and I reached into my wallet to get it and it wasn't there. My identity had disappeared and the last time I could remember having it for sure was over a week before the graceless policeman started yelling. But I'd been a million places in that week, mostly in a different state than where I was. Retracing my steps would be impossible.

How did I lose my self? Was I too focussed on other stuff - grad school, marriage, kids - to focus on my inner self? Perhaps I should have been more disciplined in the spiritual art of centering I learned from Richard Foster and yoga while living in Yosemite. Or perhaps I should have invested more into cultivating those aspects of my self that most deeply fulfilled me - prayer, writing, peppermint sticks. Part of my Christian heritage encourages this - focussing only on the relationship between my self and God, or getting the plank out of my own eye before helping another. Culture also encourages this; requiring self-help programs or at least enough self-medication to conform us to acceptable social norms.

Or perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps as I turned my attention toward things in my own life - grad school, marriage, kids - I lost the magic of fulfilling my self through service to others. Maybe the experience of ethics and theology and culture is necessarily primary and their study can only be secondary if one is to remain grounded in reality. Perhaps serving my own family and the navel-searching of academia is too self-interested or overly laden with duty to satisfy my deeper being, my purpose in life, my calling to go out.

I don't know where I lost my identity. I don't even know what state I was in. But I suspect that if I tried to retrace my steps, I'd spend too much time in the wrong places, searching in the dark with a flashlight low on batteries. Besides, the policeman is here now, demanding an answer to the question of who I am, threatening to throw me in jail until the laws that govern this life can figure out what to do with me. And who knows what identity I'd come out with on the other side.