Who Am I? Who Am I Becoming?

"A child of God" only describes my potential.

"A small animal on a space rock in a tiny corner of the universe" is also true.

Which one is more useful to focus on?

And why am I asking the question? Do I want the answer to empower me to find joy, or to justify my surrender to despair and misery?

I am what I have done and thought up until this point in my life.

Am I the good things I do or the bad things? Or all the things?

If I'm all the things, I can't reduce the disparate existants into a concept. I have to omit something. What can I properly omit? The non-essentials. Which are non-essential?

Non-essential for what? What is the goal of asking "who am I?"

If I know who I am, and I choose who I want to become, I can design a path to get me from start to finish. There is no point in knowing who I am except to know where I'm starting so that I can progress to where I want to be.

In order for knowing who I am to help me become something else, I need to find a useful pattern within the sum total of my thoughts and actions.

Consider a checkerboard. How many different patterns can I extract? Rows, columns, diagonals, zigzags... Which is it? All of them. But if I want to win at checkers, the most useful is black diagonals.

If I declare that I want to become a checker player and follow the black diagonals, the adversary will point out times that I moved vertically or horizontally and say "see? you're no checker player". God will point out the times I DID move on the black diagonals, and say "See? You can do this. I will help you"

"Child of God" allows me to feel that it's possible for me to choose an empowering pattern. Christ's atonement and grace allow me to feel worthy to choose it.

Which experiences are non-essential? The ones that don't continue to shape me when I stop doing them.

There are things that I do, that I think about even when I'm not doing them.

This is who I am. This is who I'm becoming

Who I am is who I'm becoming. I am becoming the things I think about doing even when I'm not doing them.

I have become them when I use those things to help me to do other things, because they're now a habitual part of me. I can now focus on becoming something else, because the thing I was trying to become is now a part of who I am. I don't have to think about reading or walking or talking anymore.