Chapter 7

Here’s The Me!

I have held many jobs over the years. Employment counselor. Commercial investigator. Photographer. Insurance salesman. Shoe salesman. Office manager. Library worker. IRS minion. I seemed remarkably gifted at finding jobs and somewhat less gifted at keeping them.

Eventually, while working for the Internal Revenue Service, something in me began to crack. Not dramatically. No violin music swelling in the background. Just a slow internal collapse. There were moments I briefly imagined steering my car into a bridge abutment. There was a season in which I believed that if I set the bar low enough, I could step over it easily – only to discover that tripping over a low bar hurts just as much.

And somewhere in that long gray stretch came a realization:

I could no longer live with myself.

That sentence bothered me. Because if I could not live with “myself,” then who exactly was the “I” noticing the problem?

It was a question that drove me deeper than failure, deeper than shame, deeper than employment, competence, or identity.

Who am I?

Answers came quickly at first. I am Dave Moorman. I am human. I am male. I am married. I am a father. I am reasonably intelligent. I am not especially gifted at building stable careers.

The list went on and on.

But eventually I noticed something strange. Every description after the words “I am” was optional. Changeable. Temporary. Some were socially constructed. Some were biological. Some were emotional. Some were merely circumstantial.

But beneath every changing description remained the same simple and undeniable fact:

I Am.

Everything else appeared to rest upon that center beam of awareness itself.

And wrapped around that simple awareness was another presence entirely. Busy. Tireless. Nervous. Hopeful. Wounded. Proud. Defensive. Endlessly talkative.

A little fellow I eventually came to call The Me.

The Me showed up very early in life. It learned my name and quickly became quite attached to it. It learned which faces smiled with approval and which tightened with disappointment. It learned what brought laughter, what invited ridicule, what earned gold stars, what got me sent to the principal’s office. It learned how to belong.

And because the world is large and often confusing, The Me learned to survive.

It learned how to perform competence long before competence actually arrived. It learned how to bluff. It learned how to worry in advance so pain would not come as a surprise. It learned how to replay old arguments in the shower and win them brilliantly three days too late.

The Me could become frightened over almost anything. A raised eyebrow. An unpaid bill. A political opinion. A denominational squabble. A silence at the dinner table that lasted two seconds too long.

But The Me was not merely fearful. Sometimes it was exuberant. Triumphant. Romantic. Ambitious. Certain it had finally figured everything out. The Me could become intoxicated with success, inflated with righteousness, radiant with love, or utterly convinced it was destined to change the world by Tuesday afternoon.

The Me is remarkably adaptive.

Put it in a church, and it quickly learns church language. Put it in business, and it learns the business’s vernacular. Put it in academia, and it suddenly develops strong opinions about footnotes. The Me can wear almost any costume handed to it and, after a while, mistake the costume for itself.

And all this makes perfect sense.

A small conscious being enters a world of towering forces – parents, schools, tribes, religions, governments, expectations, economies, lovers, enemies, aging, illness, death. The Me develops strategies. It gathers memories and loyalties and fears and ambitions the way a traveler gathers supplies for a difficult journey – and souvenirs to take home.

The Me is not evil.

In many ways, The Me is an astonishing achievement. It builds civilizations. It writes poetry. It invents mathematics. It creates symphonies and tax codes and internet arguments. It falls in love. It raises children. It worries about what the neighbors think.

But The Me is also exhausted.

Because beneath all its frantic activity sits a quiet uncertainty it cannot quite solve. The Me can describe itself endlessly, defend itself heroically, reinvent itself repeatedly, and still wake up at three in the morning wondering:

Who am I, really?

And somewhere underneath all the noise, all the performance, all the fear and striving and storytelling, the quieter presence remains.

I Am.

The Me is forever trying to understand what that means.