Who are you?

Yes, the question at the centre of it all, who am I?

Take away all the roles we serve and what is left?

‘It’s what we do that defines us’ aah the famous quote, well I am not Batman, but can I still be defined?

So, when illness compacted my life, severed me from all those defining roles, did I still have value. If it’s not who we are but what we do, then am I doomed?

Without a career or a job even, when illness makes that impossible, when life has been condensed to a small box of daily existence only, what then? Who am I? Who are we? The worlds useless? the left behind? the pitied? The defunct?

Ok so I had a child, that maternal role, my only grasp on respectable life, an echo of what could have been, what had been, what is yet to come. Yet still during school hours, who was I then, when other mums ran off to part time work at least, as I had tried and failed to continue with, what then?

How do we stabilise a sense of identity when we are a broken, agonised, dazed, mess? When words don’t come out right and we can’t get up from the bed. Lying there who are we?

Not a patient even, not a brave cancer fighter or victim of MS, with a condition to fight and rally against, no, just a pity filled mess of nothingness.

So, who am I?

During covid lockdown, the world has had a taste of our lives, taken away all the surety and company. All those working from home, relished the comfort of it until they had been weeks without seeing anyone apart from the supermarket front line workers, bravely risking lives for minimum wage and zero hours contracts.

Take away our main vein of identity and who are we? How do we value ourselves?

I have found and lost and found myself again and again, currently I am defining myself as me. ‘I think therefore I am’ simply, I exist. What I think, how I feel, these things matter, what I do connects to what I think and feel. Who we are is an amalgamation of how we think and value and what we physically do. We don’t all have the luxury of living the lives we envisioned for ourselves or dream of; such satisfaction is a luxury for most of us, earning money to pay bills is the priority, lives lived to their best socially and economically are for the privileged, like Bruce Wayne and his love interest, Rachel, the stuff of films and fictions unless we are lucky to be born into relative affluence.

So, what when we cannot pay the bills, what then? Fortunately, we have a social security system in the U.K, what a knock to our value system when we are forced to claim this, our system shames us and marks us with failure, yet there is a freedom in less, as there is in more, and a life of value and worth can still be lived, we must dig down deep to our essential core, but then true self-worth is attainable. Have it taken all away and still survive, that’s the greatest achievement. Learn to live in spite of it, that’s a neat trick.

Take it all away, the roles, the image, the title, the relationships, what is left?

Us! As we really are, emotional, honest, aspiring, fighting, surviving, as we feel and as we think and more importantly as we treat others.