Here is a poem I found last year. I read it every now and then, and sometimes I think — NOW, I’ve truly become my own person. Other times, I think — I’m not there yet, but someday.
It’s a difficult thing, to really have the courage and confidence to be your own person, rather than try to emulate others and do what you think will make them like you.
I worry sometimes that my blog must not be very interesting, and I don’t get many readers. Or that I don’t have a lot of people in my class whom I hang out with. Or that I need to do certain things so that I can look good to my professors or on my resume.
But what I do needs to come from inside of me — that’s the big lesson I learned from when I left the church. I cannot act in order to conform to others’ expectations AND at the same time be very happy or enthusiastic or effective in what I do.
Here is the poem. I don’t know when it will be true for me, but that’s my personal goal.
Now I Become Myself
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before–”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!— May Sarton
