Who Am I?

We live in a world of people, mainly marketers, telling us who we should be.  A world of "FOMO" and comparison to the idealized lives we see on social media.  Even though I am a 63 year old woman who is technologically challenged and spends relatively small amounts of time online, it just as easy to look at friends or even strangers and imagine that they have it "all together." With the next inevitable question being "What is wrong with me?" 

If social media and observing others isn't enough of a rabbit hole, I simply turn on the tv or read a magazine.  The marketing teams for the 4,000 - 10,000 advertisements the average person is bombarded with daily, will be happy to tell me where I am lacking and how their product can solve all my issues.  I am "addicted" to hearing from marketers, whose JOB it is to tell me who I am not, what they think I should become. Addicted to being anyone other than who I am.

Which is why I find it ever more important to ask myself every morning, what do I want?  What do I need?  Just for today or in this moment.  When I fail to question who I am and what matters to me, I find it very easy to go down the rabbit hole of lack.  I allow the world to tell me what I need. 

I have a vision in my head.  A vision of my "perfect" life.  I think about it all the time.  I dream, but I don't clarify.  I can see my perfect self, but I don't know who she really is or how to get there.  I ask myself what I want, but I don't take the time to design a path to getting there.  In other words, I live in constant frustration.  My life feels like IKEA instructions.  All pictures, but no real words on how to assemble what I need.  A map with no route from point A to point B. 

Enter marketers.  Ever quick to paint a picture for us of how they can fix our lives.  Again, no real instructions, just a view of what our lives COULD be like if we simply buy their product, follow their plan or listen to their words.  Fueling our frustration when, after purchasing, our lives do not change dramatically.  In fact, the needle rarely moves at all.  I am tired of being led, told by a world that doesn’t know me at all, who I should be.  If I am not willing to invest my own time and energy into knowing myself, what sense does it make to spend my money on someone else's solution for how to improve my world?

Many of you know me from the addiction and recovery space.  I have another side.  Another passion.  I want to help the world understand the connection between energy, climate change, consumerism and addiction.  Most of us would agree that the connection between the first two, energy and climate change, seems logical.  If we could simply get away from fossil fuels, climate change would no longer exist.  Consumerism and addiction, however, are not usually part of this conversation.

Energy is generally relegated into two areas: what kind of car I drive and how do I heat my home?  Yet energy is required for everything we do all day long.  We live under the belief that if we can simply switch to renewables, our climate change woes would subside, if not be erased all together.  Most of us do not even consider the energy used in our daily purchases.  Nor do we see that changing our buying habits can be part of the solution. Not only a solution for helping out Mother Earth, but to helping us better understand ourselves.  To easing our "addiction" to being anyone other than who we are.

If it feels like I have taken a hard right here, patience.  If you are confused about how who you want to be has ANYTHING to do with the energy and climate change conversation, I completely understand.  This is simply my way of introducing a part of who I have dreamed about being for a long time.  We need to change the conversation.  The energy conversation AND the conversation about who is responsible for who we want to be.  I want to start that conversation.

If we want change, we have to take a good hard look at where we are right now.  Stop dreaming about an idealized world that we never take the time to define - individually or collectively.  Stop dreaming and start doing.  In future blog posts, I will provide more clarity on the energy, climate change, consumerism and addiction conversation and how that applies to all of us.  For now, I hope we can get behind the truth that there is nothing "out there" that will make our lives magically better.  No matter what marketers tell us.  No ONE person, product, class, book, or event can unilaterally reinvent our world.

Change is an inside job.  Life will hand us things that we do not like.  Many things that happen to us are not our "fault"; they are simply life.  We alone are responsible for changing how we react to what life hands us.  We alone are responsible for knowing who we are and what we want.  In my five years in recovery, I have discovered that the more I focus on what I want and need, the more my world responds positively to the person I am becoming.  If that reality works on a small scale, I am hopeful that with a little education and a different perspective, being responsible for our daily choices can have a bigger impact on the health of the planet.  And on our collective mental health.  Is it possible?  Stay tuned. 

Much love to you all,

Lisa

P.S. - I am using the same picture for this blog post because I neglected to give full credit for the photo to my friend Deb Ruttenberg.  Thank you Deb for sending such a beautiful photo and my apologies for not acknowledging you in the last blog post!  Much love to you.