[Day 368] 1 thing I learned about myself

Wow. An entire year of blogging has come to an end. One whole YEAR. I will be the first to admit that my finishing this project was a long shot. But I did it. I blogged every day from August 19, 2009-August 19th, 2010. There were bumps along the way, weeks that I forgot to post, but I caught up every time. So I think before I tell you the one thing I learned about myself, I’ll recognize this incredible accomplishment. I don’t finish big things like this very often. I used to fail at posting once a week.

The one thing I learned about myself is…

1. Whatever it is that I am, I am a contradiction, but that’s ok.

See, at the beginning of this project I was confused. “Who am I?” “Which part of my personality is the defining one?” “Why don’t I know who I am??” I had been asking these questions for an awful long time, and this project was my [insane] way of sorting them out.

And now that my year has come to an end, I realized that defining myself was the absolute WORST thing I could do. Who gives a crap if I’m loud in some situations and quiet in others? Does it matter that I can be both shy and outgoing? Does anyone care that I have a wide range of interests and talents?

Yesterday, I watched a video by one of the people I’m subscribed to on YouTube about this very subject. She’s an artist, and was talking/drawing about how she didn’t know who she was. I recognize some of me in her, but also some of most people. We all strive to put ourselves in a neat little box, one with a fancy but concise label so that everyone’s clear on what’s inside.

But we’re human. We don’t fit in a little box. We cram into many. We are an entire closet of Tupperware, cardboard, and shoeboxes with haphazard duct tape labels piled over each other as we change what’s in the box. We are one million boxes of awesome and intrigue. We can’t even find most of the boxes that we are, at least not immediately. Because looking through all the boxes in the closet will take a while. But isn’t that more fun?

Who wants to know who they are in under a year? Hell, who can know who they are in under a year? Discovering yourself is a lifetime journey, but in the age of instant gratification and text messages, we’ve forgotten that and demand it to be overnighted to our doorstep.

I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter who I am, but what I do. So I’ll keep blogging and making videos, I’ll keep writing books and painting, and I’ll keep screaming my opinions at the top of my lungs. I will love and be loved, laugh and be laughed at, live and let live. At the end of the day, me as an individual is irrelevant. Me as a force of nature and a life being lived, however, is not.

Last year                                                                                This year

[Not that much has changed]