Being who we want to be.

Who do you want to see
when you look in the mirror?

Who are the people you admire most? And why do you admire them? Can we become more like them, and therefore be people who we admire?

I’ve realised that many of the people I look up to are, shall we say, slightly more rebellious by nature. People who don’t really conform, and who look to challenge those ‘norms’ that shouldn’t necessarily be ‘normal’.

Now, I’m not really a rebellious person. At least, not outwardly. I love to think I am, and I have grand ideas about being an activist and protester, but mostly I don’t do it because I’m actually quite reserved, contrary to appearances at times!

Instead, I try to use my writing to inspire or challenge others to think or act differently. I end up being a hypocrite sometimes, but we’re all on a journey, right?

(Just as an aside, one of the things I learned in my creative writing course was that, to make characters more ‘real’, you should give them apparently contradictory traits. In my case, that means being both shy, and a bit of an attention-seeker!)

It might be that you look up to someone who has talents or abilities that you don’t have, much like my lack of a real rebellious streak. But maybe you can use the talents you do have to achieve similar goals. How that works out will be different for each of us.

I suppose another way of putting this is: what sort of person do you wish you were? There’s a line from a song I’ve been listening to recently that says: ‘When I look at myself, I don’t see the man I wanted to be.’ (One Step Up – Martyn Joseph © Piper Records 2010 – a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song)

I don’t want that to be me; I want to be the person I want to be.

The only thing stopping us is ourselves.