If I try to be or do something noble that has nothing to do with who I am, I may look good to others and to myself for a while. But the fact that I a… - Parker Palmer

I was fired because that job had little to do with who I am, with my true nature and gifts, what I care and do not care about. My resort to adolescent rebellion reflected that simple fact. … I was laughing to keep myself sane. Perhaps the research I was doing was what a good sociologist “ought” to do, but it felt meaningless to me, and I felt fraudulent doing it. Those feelings were harbingers of things to come, things that eventually led me out of the profession altogether. Obviously I should have dealt with my feeling more directly and exercised more self-control. Either I should have quit that job under my own steam or settled in and done the work properly. But sometimes the "shoulds" do not work because the life one is living runs crosswise to the grain of one's soul. At that time of my life, I had no feeling for the grain of my soul and of which way was crosswise. Not knowing what was driving me, I behaved with blind but blissful unconsciousness—and reality responded by giving me a big and hard-to-take clue about who I am.

I waste energy on anger rather than investing it in hope.

As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability; under social pressures … our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.