Marketing Email
The email ads say “Reinvent Yourself” or “Jumpstart Your Career” or “Make It Big in 2016” and all I want to do is be myself and keep my career on a steady path, or at least idling. I’ve made it big enough and it doesn’t last. I have gotten to points where I wanted to reinvent myself, or what I called wanting to “change my life” which was the “old school” way to say it I guess. And I have and I did and it’s impossible. Being me is all I can do.
But there is a missing element. What is me? It’s not about “Who am I?” It’s about what is in me that matters. That counts. That transcends the old age and the ability (or current inability) to get a job. That is the part of me that is the engine of the who that I am.
It’s like the kids book, “Are you my mother?” in which the baby bird looks at all the grown ups of the various species and doesn’t really know its mother. Like how weird for a baby to look around and not know where it came from and who will take care of it forever.
But it’s not my mother I’m looking for it’s my identity. And just that illusive concept looms over me like a monster of the unknown, as if I have to beg for it. If it is to be “my” identity, shouldn’t it want me? Wouldn’t it be happy for me to go with it and be with it, as if it is my mother? Now as an old person, I’m looking for the origin, maybe not the mother, not the place, but the internal thing that is my guide or my path or on my path or to my path, or something I think (perhaps foolishly) is going to take care of me. With goose wings outspread. I need money and therefore a job because that is the way I was brought up. One’s identity is one’s job, so we go out and get one, and we get our identity as the little bonus membership card to carry around with us. Membership into Identity Annonymous. I have held those cards and pocketed those cards and I have a collection of those cards. I made an artistic collage of those cards once. Hmmm, maybe that still exists somewhere.