The therapeutic process comes with many revelations, when done properly.  I gave up trying to keep count of the number of things I’ve learned about the world, myself, and other people since my awakening eight years ago and starting therapy shortly thereafter.  Some were small things and some were large things, and some were gradual realizations while others were sudden epiphanies.

A gradual realization I had a few years ago was that I had little to no self-identity.  I literally had no idea who I was.  In fact, the question “who are you?” didn’t even make sense to me.  If someone had asked me that philosophically, all I would have been able to say would have been to give my name.

I had to spend some time asking myself what it was that was even meant by the question “who are you?”  Did people mean what do I like?  What am I good at?  What do I believe in?  I didn’t understand what information was being sought.  What do you mean, “who” am I?  I’m me, who else would I be?  My only answer seemed to be sacrilegious in nature: I am what (or who) I am.

From a Buddhist perspective, the question really is nonsensical, for Buddhists believe in the concept of shunyata, or ‘emptiness’.  This is not a void-like emptiness as conceived of in the West, but the emptiness of our individual meaning in the absence of connections to others.  For what would we really be if we were completely severed from those we are connected to?  Imagine the lives of those that are devoid of connection: do they look happy?

So for a Buddhist, the answer to “who are you?” is “no one”, not without the connections that define our lives.  Which is largely how I felt in some ways, like I didn’t really exist.  But that is not in keeping with the feeling of wholeness that Buddhism is supposed to instill.  And that was the problem: I didn’t feel whole.

While I was and still am extraordinarily grateful for the awakening process, one of its effects was a shattering of what felt like a thick shell enclosing my True Self.  This shell broke into many parts, some of which had to be discarded because they were damaged or unnecessary.  I pieced myself back together with what was left, but was far from complete.  I was missing large pieces of myself, and I would have to either mystically retrieve them in the style of a shaman, or completely reconstruct them.

And so that’s what I’ve been doing for the last few years: fetching lost parts of myself and putting them back where they belong, sometimes having to heal them first, and reconstructing what was lost or never present in the first place in a process of reparenting myself in a healthier way than was done when I was growing up.

I also very deliberately gave up the identity that was given to me as a child and chose an identity of my own when I legally changed my name.  That may have been the true beginning of establishing “who I am” and figuring out what that even means.  When I changed my name, I began keeping a list in a journal of all of the things about “myself” that I could think of in an effort to answer the question “who am I?”

This list also included things that I wanted to embody in my life, which became part of the construction process.  In that process, I began to discover as well as create myself, and in doing so, gained the ability to describe myself, something I could never do before.  Being asked to write even a short biography of myself was paralyzing, and I could never think of what to say.

I discovered that had changed when I began working on revamping my website as well as working on various book projects, both of which had writing brief bios as part of the work.  I found it easy to come up with a couple of sentences to describe myself.

Rainy is a writer and artist living in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, two sons, and four cats.  She has been practicing Buddhism and Earth-centered spirituality for over 30 years.  When she’s not writing or painting, she’s gardening, hiking, reading, and thinking about Everything.

While brief, it’s accurate and fairly complete.  It seems simple and rudimentary for a person of my age, but I see these basic elements of my life like DNA nucleotides that combine to create great complexity and diversity.  Besides, while I may be in my 50s physically, psychologically there are parts of me that are still 6, 11, and 14 years old, and so from that perspective, I really am still building my life since I did not have the opportunity to do so at the time.

And yet, after all of the stress and excitement of my life, it will suit me just fine if my life remains centered around writing, painting, gardening, hiking, reading, and thinking.  It’s peaceful, and when done properly, rejuvenating, which is what I need more than anything. As Bilbo Baggins says in The Fellowship of the Ring, “It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.”

Who am I?  I am a Traveler on the Journey of Life, with no set destination or time of arrival, and only the Compass of my intuition and the Map of my Experience to guide my way.  I have no ambitions other than to expand the horizons of my Knowledge, to strive to do the Right Thing, regardless of how difficult that may be, and to alleviate suffering when I can, both my own and that of others.

I am the Bipolar Bodhisattva.