As I struggle to recover from decades of depression, I have realized that I do not truly know who I am. The depression has been my identity for so long that I do not really know who I am without it. And if I am to recover from this long, long illness, I will need to create and/or discover a solid and real identity upon which to base my life.

This means that not only do I need to know who I truly am, I need to free myself of who I am not. I have to rid myself of false ideas of who I am in order that the truth can fill the spaces left behind.

So tonight, I am going to introduce you to (some of) all the people I am not and will never be, no matter what I do, up to and including the day I die.

And once I have done so, we can see them for what they are, and then say goodbye to them forever.

I am not a calm person. I am, instead, a fairly excitable person. This is not a bad thing. In fact, a talent for enthusiasm, both having it and expressing it, is a rare thing in our blase society where everybody pretend to not really care about anything in particular and where getting too excited about anything is disdained as noisy boat-rocking by the disinterested and disengaged.

I have, in fact, an overflowing, effervescent personality, and instead of brutally shushing myself inside, I should be learning to harness all the steam power that comes from having such a strong, passionate, powerful personality.

So I am not a calm person. I can live with that.

I am not a competent and practical person. I just am not. This one hurts more to let go, because I deeply respect practical, competent people who can focus on the here and now and apply themselves in effective, direct way to the problems at hand. I want to be that sort of person so badly that I have excoriated myself quite harshly over the years for being such a goofy so and so (to put it very very mildly).

But as much as I admire practical, sensible people, I am just not that guy. My skills and strengths are of a different sort. That is not to say that I do not have good, strong, useful, life-applicable skills that valuable and valid on their own.

But I am just not a “master of reality”. I am not a masterful, competent person who is very good at dealing with the physical realities of life. I do my best, and I will always be the kind of person who keeps their eyes on the bottom line and who pays great attention to the pragmatic realities of a situation, but there is a big difference between being pragmatic and being practical.

So goodbye, practical me. You were never real in the first place, and I need to let you die, and learn to value other things in myself.

It is OK to be a goofy kind of guy. I help out in other ways.

I am not a neat and tidy person. And I never will be. I can learn to be a little better at cleaning up and keeping it clean, but I just will never be focused enough on the physical reality of my surroundings to truly care whether all my books are neatly filed away, or whether I can see all of the floor all of the time. I am just not that kind of person.

And that is fine. I have a lot of substantial virtues, and in the grand scheme of things, whether or not one makes the bed every night before sleeping in it or empties the wastepaper basket like clockwork once a fortnight is not an enormously important determinant of character. To beat myself over a lack of the fairly minor virtues of neatness and tidiness is pure self-bullying, and I am not prepared to put up with that kind of thing any more.

After all, Einstein was a great man without ever learning to keep his hair combed. So farewell, the neat and tidy person I will never be.

Get out of my way. I have thing I’ve got to do.

I am not a detail-oriented person. Relatedly, I will never be a person who is into the fine details of life. It is not that I do not care about them, I do. Small details can trip up big ideas, and I am all about the big ideas.

But I am a big picture person down to my core, and so I will always be looking at life from the telescope down, not from the microscope up. I will never be the person who does things perfectly. I will always be at best a B+ student because I am too focused on the larger picture to get straight A’s.

And that is fine. Other people can handle the small pictures that make up the big picture. They will always need someone like me to drive the bus while they work hard making sure it keeps going.

So goodbye, fine detail me. You might not notice the cracks in the pavement, but it is because you are always looking much further down the road.

I am not a stable person. This is another tough one, because I crave stability and reliability so much, but I just cannot generate it in myself. I am a complicated and multifaceted person who always has a lot going on in his head, with layers upon overlapping layers of thought and processing happening all at the same time, and that does not make for a rock solid personality of enormous endurance and stability. It instead makes for a colorful and warm person who has a vibrant charm that the more stable and boring normal people tend to lack.

So farewell, stable and reliable me. I will miss you most of all, Tin Man, but you were not to be. It does not mean I am a bad person, or a flake.

It just means that I vibrate on too many frequencies to be a single solitary note.

Instead, I am more of a charmingly baroque choir.

And those are a lot more fun anyhow, aren’t they?

That will be all for now. I am sure there are other false versions of myself waiting to be set free, but I think this is enough soul excavation for one evening.

Thanks for helping me dig.