And now, and at long last, I can be myself. There are difficult things about aging and beautiful things about it.

One of the beautiful things is the gift of self. I finally figured out who I am. The challenge is to stop pondering and start living.

For many years, there was a voice inside of me to find my selfhood.

I  have never trusted the idea of selfhood, I had the idea that the belief that my broken and damaged self would always be selfish, confused, and frightened unless healed by the external forces of death and or heaven, depending on what I believed.

I didn’t trust heaven either and did not expect and do not expect to go there. And I’ve never embraced the idea of God.

My idea of self was ravaged by the way other people – including my parents and those my age – treated me. I had no self to help me navigate my life.

Even now, I can’t forget the dreadful beating my best friend Eddie endured in the schoolyards during recess, or my shame is not helping him.

They got me occasionally, but I was faster than Eddie and more alert. Terror can do that.

If I was a good person, why were my friends and I so bullied, why did my family ignore me and the other children taunt and laugh at me, and why did my father shame me every night for the wedding of my bed? I never understood what the trigger was.

Even the bullies had a sense of self.

Inside of me was a voice deep down pleading with me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me by God or the angels, the self I fantasized about every night to get to sleep, the brave and robust self who fought back and chased the bullies out of the schoolyard.

 

It wasn’t until a few years ago, when I met and married Maria, that I received a wonderful gift; I began to accept this original selfhood given to me at birth and still alive inside me. It was the beginning of my transformation.

It is a confusing gift, one’s self, something I was given at birth but didn’t believe. How, I wondered, will I recognize it if I can find it?

Accepting it was even more demanding and complex than attempting to become someone else, which was my goal for much of my life.

I had a dream a few years ago that rattled me; in the dream, I had died and was being interviewed for a spot in heaven, and the angel questioned me, looked through some files, and then asked me: “Why were you not Jon?” Initially shocked, I understood the question and then woke up. I had no sense of self.

I never figured out if I got into heaven or not.

Shortly after I left the ordinary and moved to the alien, I got more serious about figuring out who I was. It was like digging in a sinkhole; the deeper I got, the more confused I was. I was playing with fire, unleashing old demons.

My deepest calling has always been to grow into my authentic self – a searching man, meaning but not always succeeding in being genuine, but still solid and compassionate, whether or not it conformed to the self that others wanted me to be and demanded that I be.

Or whether I was told I ought to be.

After some hard work, I began to find the joy I had always sought and found my path of authentic meaning and service in the world. It was always there, right inside of me! It was waiting patiently for me to grow up.

Henri Nouwens wrote that vocation was “where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” And my own deep need.

I began exploring the nature of my human self, which brought me happiness and the deep joy of knowing that I am here to use the gifts I was given but were buried so deep inside me that I could not feel or see them.

As I learned more about the seeds and source of my selfhood, the one I was born with, I was thrilled to meet him later in life. I learned more about the world in which I grew up and was formed and in which I am called to live – responsively, accountably, and joyfully with other beings of every kind.

I hope to embody the great idea of loving my neighbors and myself one day.

I have to give credit to my blog and to the bullying and hostility I encountered early in life and what I recalled while trying to write about my hero journey. The blog threw me into contact with the real world, sometimes wonderful, sometimes brutal.

When someone sent me a cruel or hostile message, I would tell myself, “Think of Eddy in the schoolyard,” and lash out at the new kind of bully, the ones I never saw. I thought it was about vengeance and punishment. I thought being strong was the same thing as being tough. It isn’t.

I knew I was getting closer to being myself when I dropped this idea of justice and vengeance for my early life and focused instead on the self I was born to be. That self did not argue with strangers who wrote hateful messages. It just wasn’t who he was born to be.

And today, as I write this, it is no longer who I finally am.

This search for self was a journey into darkness, a hero journey through strange and dark places. That is how Joseph Campbell described the hero’s journey, as a frightening and dangerous journey from which many people never return whole or at all.

“The first fact that distinguishes the human species from all others is that we are born too soon,” wrote Campbell in an early Transformational Bible of mine, Pathways To Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation. Transformation, he wrote, is always painful and always dangerous. If it works, it can be glorious and affirming. Magic helpers, often in the form of animals, will try to help me guide me.

“We arrive, incapable of caring for ourselves for something like fifteen years. Puberty doesn’t come along for twelve years or more, and physical maturity doesn’t come until our early twenties. During the greater part of this long arc of life, the individual is in a psychological situation of dependency.”

We are trained, he wrote, not to think but to react. Everyone is raised with an attitude of submission to authority and fear of punishment.

The people torn between dependency and responsibility grow up to become neurotic, says Campbell.

Joseph Campbell presented the first pathway for me on my transformation from a crippled neurotic to a whole and functioning human being, finally free to be his better self and accept who he is. The transformation is not all rosy.

I am who I am, sometimes good and sometimes bad. The big difference is that I came to accept me, a form of love that goes deep.

But I am always me.

As I tiptoe towards the end of life, I am finally me.