I kept thinking to myself, wow, this is so me

Our identity is not a liability.

Quite the opposite. It’s an asset. Maybe even a superpower.

Because when we know who we are, we’re not easily threatened or thrown off course by inaccurate reflections in the mirror of the world’s expectations. If people’s feedback doesn’t track with who we know ourselves to be, their words simply slide right off us like a loose sock.

As we’re truly secure in yourself, we alone can figure out how to take care of our needs and wants without society’s preconceived notions influencing our decisions.

Hobbes’s famous proverb, scientia potential est, or knowledge is power, comes into play here.

Particularly as it relates to knowledge of the self. The more we can understand own sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and other mental states, the better.

The nature of our acquaintance with our unique mental, physical, emotional and spiritual reality is the ultimate form of leverage.

What’s fascinating is, a person can deepen their identity awareness virtually anytime, anywhere. There is no task, project, activity, endeavor or interaction in which we can’t learn about ourselves. Not if our intention is to walk away with some parcel of new knowledge.

I remember when I spent two weeks traveling through the desert, shooting footage for my silent western movie. The process was adventurous, exhausting and rewarding in ways I didn’t expect.

After all, I’d made movies before, but always with the help of cameramen, directors and other technical support. For this project, my goal was to see if I could do everything. To go full auteur and actually operate the camera itself.

Turns out, it’s harder than it looks. You would be surprised just how physically demanding that job is.

My knees were aching. It was a hundred degrees every day, plus high elevation, which meant I would sweat through all my clothes after an hour of filming.

Good times. Mad respect for people who do this for a living.

But my biggest knowledge gain from the shoot wasn’t just the technical aspects of composition, lighting, movement and camera angles.

I walked away from the experience with deeper awareness of my own identity. It was the most inspiring thing. Every day I crawled around on my hands and knees in the hot desert dirt, trying to find beautiful and interesting moments to capture, I kept thinking to myself, wow, this is so me.

• My seven year old self is giddy with anticipation right now, since that’s when I first fell in love with western films.
• My seventeen year old self feels energized with this sense of artistic vision, because that’s the time in my life when I really began honing my identity as an artist.
• The twentysomething version of me, who came into his own as an entrepreneur and professionalized his creative practice. That guy is doing some serious mental backflips while shooting this movie.
• My thirty year old self who finally learned how to relax and to optimize artmaking for joy, meaning and fulfillment, rather than dysfunctional and workaholic career advancement.

Shooting this western film felt like the embodiment, the apotheosis of a human experience. It was a visual experience of summarizing myself. There’s no other way I can explain it.

Grandiose and narcissistic as it all sounds, somehow walking around the mountains with a camera gifted me with this closer grasp of the truth, and of the reality of the world that I lived in. I felt powerful in a new and exciting way. Who cares if anyone ever even saw the final product? The movie was just the artifact. The real story was the validation of self that occurred along the way.

It’s like my mentor always used to tell me, first you write the book, then the book writes you.

How has knowledge of who you are given you power? What recent experience afforded you greater identity awareness?