When I was in sixth grade, there was a question my teacher asked us a lot. At first, I thought it was to make us, her students, think. We quickly learned, however, that the question was “rhetorical,” meaning “a question which, if answered aloud, would get you a withering stare and extra geography homework.”
The question was, “Who do you think you are?”
Actually it’s a great question, and your answer can change many times in the course of your life. But here’s the thing: Sometimes who you think you are turns out to be not who you are at all.
Case in point: In sixth grade, I was tempted to answer the teacher’s question this way: “Who I am is a great equestrian!” I knew the word “equestrian” because I’d read every horse book ever written. In fact I was a great reader but a terrible equestrian, and this I proved at every two-bit horse show in which I participated.
No matter how fervently I believed the myth of my own equestrian greatness, I could not keep my horse Beno from stopping to eat the hay bale he was supposed to jump over or from turning rump-ward toward the stands and relieving himself as I sat helplessly aboard. There was also the problem of the broom head sticking out of my collar, which my riding instructor rammed down the back of my shirt to force me to sit up straight.
In my 30s, I’d have said I was an able potter. But when I finally enrolled in a pottery class to prove it, I was the only student who, after weeks of lessons, hours of personal attention and no small amount of crying, still could not center a piece of clay on the wheel. It wouldn’t have been that big a deal – after all, hand-built pottery is an art form all its own, and some of my favorite dinnerware is misshapen and heavy as an anvil – except that the act of centering is imbued with all kinds of spiritual significance. Centering is to pottery-making what meditating is to monk-making. Without that basic but critical skill, you are doomed to a kind of unholy mediocrity that cannot be rectified by anything short of your own virgin birth.
In my 50s I would tell you that, having shaken the depression that dogged me well into my 30s, I’m finally reasonably fun to be around. But this too may be a myth. Just the other day I was sitting in my office with a co-worker friend who had turned in her notice. Another employee came in to say how much she’d miss her, because she was, according to this employee, “delightful,” “fun” and “funny.”
Never one to draw attention to myself, I piped up, “I’m funny.”
The employee looked at me with the eyes of a certain sixth-grade teacher and said (and I quote), “No you’re not.”
I won’t lie. This information came to me as somewhat of a shock. Over the years I’ve come to terms with the fact that I can scale a horse the way “Free Solo” climber Alex Honnold scaled El Capitan, but that I can’t ride around a show ring without looking like I’m on my way to clean a house. And I’ve accepted that my pottery lacks a certain religious intensity. But this new information, imparted with all the bedside manner of acerbic TV doctor Gregory House, that I am not funny?
Well, this was a blow.
I’m comforted only by the knowledge that into every life some painful truths must fall. I have a friend who was disabused of the notion that she was interesting by her very own father, who stopped her in the middle of her recounting of a dream and said, “Oh honey, there’s nothing more boring than someone else’s dream.”
And there’s the woman who, when she was 8 years old, met Catherine Zeta-Jones and told her that she, too wanted to be an actress. Zeta-Jones looked her up and down, said, “You’re pretty enough, I suppose,” and promptly turned away. And just like that, a little girl’s youthful naïveté was flattened under the sledgehammer of reality, as she learned that looks reign, and hers were just “enough.”
So. Who do you think YOU are? Are you absolutely certain? Because sometimes we think we know the answer to that question, only to discover we don’t know ourselves at all. Contrary to what I had come to believe, I apparently am not funny.
But thanks to the person who told me this, I have not stopped laughing.
Email Dana at Dana@danashavin.com or follow her on Facebook at Dana Shavin Writes. Visit her website at DanaShavin.com.