Be True to Your LEGOs

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”

– Joseph Campbell

Does a fear of love come from a fear of entrapment? I was discussing with my Aunt Kathy how half the married couples in America end up getting divorced, or they should be but they stay together in mutual misery. The love that was supposed to set you free is instead a shackle around your ankle. How could I keep from making the same mistake someday?

Then Aunt Kathy laid some wisdom on me: we're all LEGOs. Allow me to explain:

Love can start out on a false premise. Some girls will take up the guy's interests or values for her own, even if it's not really what she likes. She becomes the permeable membrane that absorbs the essence of the other person. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote about this in her memoir Eat Pray Love:

“Some time after I’d left my husband, I was at a party and a guy I barely knew said to me, 'You know, you seem like a completely different person, now that you’re with this new boyfriend. You even dress like him and talk like him. You know how some people look like their dogs? I think maybe you always look like your men.'"

If you're a LEGO, each brick that you're made up of represents a like, interest, or value. It's what you are and the potential of who you want to be. Each brick makes up the whole; you can't take away any piece without changing the person. It's not written on our skin either; if you don't know, you have to discover them for yourself.

When people go to "find themselves," it's as if they're detaching all the LEGO bricks they tried to force on themselves from other people, and are discovering what they are really made of underneath. Do you know what you're made up of?

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