Who’s driving the bus?

The story goes like this: I had a big plan to do “X” and I set about doing it. I was fully confident in its success, and very enthusiastic. A few weeks later I looked around and found myself at “P” and simply couldn’t understand it! How did I end up here? What happened to my plan? What was I thinking?

Does any of this sound familiar? This type of thing happened to me many times in my life. Only when I was much older and had taken time to reflect on myself, my history, habits, and thought patterns, did I start to understand it. I had lots of help from people who could see me in a way I was not able, or willing to, and provide me feedback. It took me some time to be able to accept any of that feedback, but after I did it once it got easier and easier to do again, and be able to see myself from their perspective, and start to understand my motivations– who was driving my bus. It certainly wasn’t the person I thought it was.

Most of us typically create many personas in our lives.  The word “persona” comes from the Greek word for the large masks that early Greek actors would use to portray their characters. It was something they hid behind to be someone else. I’ve found quite a few as I look back in my history. Then I started to look at how they evolved. Why did I adapt them, what were they doing for me? As I dug I realized they were each based on the different experiences I have had, from childhood forward. It seems many hat I developed in my twenties resulted from my relationship with my father. Others may have been offshoots of that, or evolved from new experiences with peers. Ultimately I found I was adapting these roles to address mistaken understandings I made about my experiences, and many of those were subconscious. That’s who was driving my bus, and like I said, I really didn’t know who that was, and they were definitely taking me somewhere I did not want to go.

With that in mind I set out to identify how ‘they’ came to exist (in my mind) and why I had created ‘them.’ That’s a much longer story, intertwined with things like PTSD, ADH, and more of those great acronyms describing our behavior patterns, again based on our experiences. I began to see how things got started way back, like when I was as young as age six. How my interpretation of events was skewed because I had no frame of reference for them, no way to understand them. That’s not just me, it’s most of us as we grow up. Some are lucky enough to have great guides, others have to do more of their own figuring. We all grow up, at least on the outer physical side. On the inside we can hide, like a persona, or we can go right out there and speak up, get messy, and figure ourselves out. I’ve been fortunate enough to do both so I could experience them. I wont say it was by choice, likely more necessity. In either case I like the results of digging and sorting things out, being able to clear much of the haziness up, and look out the windshield with a smile, knowing I am really the one driving the bus now.