Write. Travel. Live

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson I've been thinking about this a lot lately. A study I've been doing talks about identity, about challenging those notions of who you are to determine who you truly are meant to be. Our identities are made of so many things. They're relational to others, to our jobs, to our residence, to our cultural status, to our beliefs, to our gender, to our race, to so many things. But that's not the whole picture, right? Are we reduced to our existence in relation to others? I think, in part, that is our identity. But if that's where we stop, that's not the whole story. That's not the whole of who we are. Maybe it takes losing a big part of that identity to realize this. I certainly feel I've undergone an identity shift in the last few years since losing Jim. I experienced an earlier one in the years after losing my job at The Advoc...