Conversation with Lake and Kyle about identity and alignment

Last month I was in Granby, Colorado (near Rocky Mountain National Park) with seven friends from college.

Every year we do a trip to a different national park.

For me, it’s a time to reset and reflect on my progress and goals.

I actually started writing this newsletter on our trip to Cascades National Park in Washington in 2021.

This year in Colorado, the weather was perfect in late September. The leaves were changing colors. The mornings were 50s and the afternoons were 70s.

One morning, Lake, Kyle, and I talked on the back patio.

I wrote down snippets from the conversation in my journal as we talked …

Lake: If it hadn’t worked out, I would have had to do some soul-searching.

Kyle: I don’t believe that. You would have just gotten back to work.

It’s never fun to fail at something you thought you could do.

You do what you say you’re going to do, what you’re about, what’s aligned for you, and then that becomes your identity, how people see you.

As your identity gets tied up with it, it’s more painful if you’re wrong.

If you know it’s who you are, it doesn’t matter if you fail.

Lake: There’s a difference between writing/speaking something to yourself versus speaking to someone else. Because you can lie to yourself, but it’s harder to lie to someone else.

Cole: I tell myself I’m not making progress, but if I actually look at graphs, things are definitely progressing.

Lake: It feels like I’m never doing enough, not working hard enough, others are doing better. But the metrics tell a different story than the one I’m telling myself.

Shame is what makes you never feel good enough for anything.

Kyle: My therapist makes me sit and listen to her tell me, “You are good enough.” I squirm. I don’t want to hear it.

Lake: I have to remind myself every morning the metrics say I’m doing good.

Kyle: Eventually you don’t need the metrics. You just feel confident internally that you’re doing the right thing.

Lake: Being where you’re supposed to be, doing what you’re supposed to be doing, with who you’re supposed to be with.

Kyle: Do what makes you feel cool to yourself.

I used to only be able to do that by thinking of other people as not cool or less cool than me. You don’t need the “fuck ‘em” mentality. You just need the internal confidence in who you are.

Lake: I went back home and saw things from my childhood and thought to myself, it makes sense. I saw a stack of encyclopedia books.

Who did you want to be as a kid? For me, I wanted to be the intellectual characters in books. Characters that made being knowledgeable cool.

Cole: What are the questions you ask yourself to determine if you’re being intentional?

Lake: Why the fuck am I doing this?

Kyle: Does this make me feel cool? Does this make me feel like me?

Which is a never-ending question to answer because you’re continually discovering who you are.

My therapist asked me, “If you have everything you wanted and you are who you want to be, what does that look like?”

Lake: My therapist asked me, “Tell me about 10 years from now if it’s all perfect. Tell me about what it would feel like.”

When I actually think about it, there’s not actually that much that’s different from what I have now. So why do I still feel discontent?

They are differences in quantity, not in type. Which is when I realize the question I have to answer for myself is, “How much is enough?”

Kyle: What makes you feel the most like you?

Art is an expression of yourself. It’s the expression of you as you’re constantly discovering yourself.

Cole: I get myself into these situations where I’ve been so focused on the outcome for a while and then zoom out and look at what my life has become in the meantime and say to myself, “Wait, this isn’t what I want my life to be.”

Lake: It may take months … even thinking about the idea of the questions I don’t want to answer.

Cole: Imagine if church actually helped you do this work.

As a society, people are getting more therapy.

But does that work have to be done between patient and therapist in a medical setting?

What would it look like to do that therapy work in the course of our everyday lives?

Like going to church on Sunday.