Identity crisis

Hi my name is Tara. The question to inevitably follow is this, “nice to meet you and what is it you do?” Heart sinks, mouth goes dry, and I clumsily fumble over my words before blurting out some kind of thrown together response to both explain what I do AND justify why I left the corporate world.

Society has snuck that very sentence into the etiquette handbook somewhere, I’m sure of it. I blame culture for the main reason we tend to live behind labels.

It’s all too easy to forget who you are and live under what you do, or don’t do, for that matter. We subconsciously believe these titles will make us feel safe and it gives us a straight forward response. A response that we feel validates who we are and that others will accept.

Executive. Entrepreneur. Mother. Wife. Blogger. Small business owner. Or those fancy-shamancy latest buzz words; ‘Girl Boss’ and ‘Solopreneur’.

When I handed in my resignation and waved goodbye to the corporate 9-5, there were bursts of excitement but more than that there was a blanket of fear. Not even necessarily concerning failure or worry of fulfilling my vision, although some of that was mixed in to the bunch as well, but the fear was more so of what others would think. Or what would I say when I had to muddle up an answer for that introductory question? I can remember pulling out a pad of paper and scribbling down some titles such as editor, writer, freelancer so that I could pull something out of the hat when asked how I spend my days.

I was walking in the thick of an identity crisis. I could throw around all of the words to describe my talents and skills but struggled to tap into the heart. What makes me tick, what stirs my spirit, what makes my heart overly excited, what are my passions, dreams and life goals. A whole new set of questions that I had never really pondered. Sure I had an idea of what I thought ‘Tara’ should be, but who was she really. It felt as though I needed to do some soul searching and go back to square one. Who am I at the thick of it? Let me tell ya, this is a scary thing. To think that we can see the weeks, months fly past without considering the very essence of who we are.

So as I find myself on this journey I need to remind myself that we each bring a beautiful, unique, mighty gift to the world just by simply being. So what if we allowed ourselves to go back to the basics and deem ourselves worthy and enough. Despite the titles we throw on. What if we make more time to stop, to breathe and do a little soul searching as to what invigorates our spirit?

I’d think we find that the heart of it the true us is imperfectly perfect and has a lot to share with the world. Be you. The unique, free from titles, wonderful you. And live big, love big and soak up each beautiful moment before you.