ID 101 - 1: Who am I?

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This may seem an odd question coming from a 55-year-old man. I must know who I am, by now. And, indeed, until now, this question had an obvious answer: I am who I decide to be.

I’ve always been a big promoter of “follow your dreams”, and a proponent of the theory that a person doesn’t find oneself but invents oneself.

According to this principle, I have always decided who I wanted to be (and what)  (see You don’t find yourself; you invent yourself on page 16), and relentlessly assumed that “persona”.

So, when I started to want to be a professional, I went to university. I then refined that to IT, as I seemed suited to it, and pursued that. I took on that personality and shaped it through my career to become who I thought I wanted to be.

Yet that ignored the fact that my personality (the TRUE me that lurks beneath the surface of who I portray to be) is not suited to that kind of work environment (that’s probably for another essay!).

By itself, this created a conflict. I have always believed that we must be true to ourselves, no matter what. I guess that’s what some people call “keeping it real”. So, there was an incompatibility between who I really was, and who I wanted to be, at an intrinsic mind and soul level.

I did try and reconcile the two by becoming an independent consultant, yet eventually it became clear that there was no way to be my true self while working as one does in IT.

Additionally, recently I became aware of the fact that I may be autistic. This has not been a shock. probably most people who know me have thought of me as the Asperger’s guy on a few occasions. However, this has got my brain ticking and wondering:  If I had known this when I was choosing my University Degree, and then my career, would I have made the same choices? WOULD I BE THE SAME PERSON?

So, in this “paper” I am going to discuss who I am, at every level, and try to ascertain if I am “real”, or who the real me is.

 

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