FINDING ONESELF

Finding oneself is not as safe as it used to be. At one time teen-agers left home and wandered the globe, seeking an individual identity. “I’m finding myself,” they’d say, when you wondered why they hadn’t made it home for dinner. How simple life was back then.
But now it’s so much easier to find yourself, and so much harder to escape from the self you find. Today I searched for myself—on line. I was looking to see what others would see if they searched for me. Lo and behold, I was there. Not only was I there, but on one website,
Westwood Unitarian Audio Archive
I discovered that I had been recorded giving what they called a “sermon”.
“Oh dear,” I thought. “I don’t give sermons.”
I suppose I was hanging on a technicality. I give presentations, occasionally at churches, some of them on Sunday mornings. And I couldn’t deny having given this one, though I wouldn’t have called it a sermon. What would my Granny have said?
Maybe I should have known better than to click that link. It was me all right, and I shuddered when I heard myself. In a feeble attempt at redemption, I apologized in advance to all those future clickers who click that link expecting a real sermon. And as a protective measure, I almost took a vow of silence.
But then I got to wondering why it is that recordings of me never sound like the person I hear when I speak, even though I always think that recordings of other people sound like those people sound to my ears. And then I got to wondering if movie stars hate to watch themselves in the movies. And I got so distracted that I forgot to take the vow of silence. I wonder if I’ll remember next time.