Who are you without your identities? Let's learn how to embrace detachment and find out!
In my last blog post, I gave some tips on detaching emotionally from environmental triggers out of your control. When writing it, I realized I have many more examples of areas where detachment is beneficial for me to continue evolving. Today, I will share how I use detachment to reframe how I identify myself and clarify what detachment means to me. In sharing these tools, I want to help anybody reading this use detaching to empower you to recognize your self-worth and protect your mental in this ever-changing world.
To clarify what detachment means, I looked up the word’s definition to provide a frame of reference for this post. My favorite app to look up words and save meanings is dictionary.com, so a picture of their description is below.
What I found interesting was that the words that came up and were related to the word detach were disengage, disentangle, and disassociate. Seeing these words is a great way to help you visually step into the energy you want to be in when you reflect on how you identify yourself in this world. One of the most freeing realizations in life is that you aren’t in control of what others do and say to you. You can manifest, pray, and wish on a flying star, but the only person you can control is yourself. Being able to disengage when you are mistreated, when your life vision no longer aligns with that job, and when you are too dependent on others' validation is essential in keeping your mental health.
Mental health can involve your mind and body, where you focus and give energy freely. These are all areas in your control. Everything else? It is circumstantial and can change at any moment. Nothing in this material world is stable. Not your source of income, housing, spouse, friend group, etc. I know that society’s mainstream agenda is very different from this concept. But if you disentangle from what society tells you what makes you valuable and instead focus on your mindset, willpower, and actions, you can live your life on your terms! It’s much more empowering to consider who you are and what you can do than internalizing what others are doing, if they like what you are doing and how they will react if you don’t stick to the script.
Concept: I am who I am with and without my job
Identifying heavily with your occupation can be dangerous for mental stability because jobs and careers come and go. For example, there is an entrepreneur named Hakeem Temidayo Seriki. You may know him by his rapper name, Chamillionaire. He is well known for several songs, but you may have seen his lyrics from the song called Ridin’ used the most. There are so many gifs created with his lines from that song!
I wanted to highlight Hakeem because I love reading and learning about inspiring stories. Instead of allowing his identity as a rapper to define him his entire life, he made significant investments in himself and his future. According to the data collected from Wikipedia and fellow Medium blogger
Michael Beausoleil, Hakeem joined the venture capital firm Upfront Ventures and became the CEO of Chamillitary Entertainment. He even created a social media app for collaborating and conversing with others called Convoz and now focuses on his entrepreneurial and investment career over his music career. Imagine if he had put all his ego and identity into being a rapper for the rest of his life.
To grow into who we are meant to be, embracing detachment from identities helps us be open-minded about our life path's endless possibilities. Why place all your identity on a job and career path when you don’t know your future? The person you are today with goals and dreams may want to achieve new goals and objectives! It’s good to be proud of the effort you put into your job, but try to check in and make sure you love who you are without that external validation of having that job title.
Strive to do your best at your job, and be content with your job, but don’t be afraid if you ever need to pivot due to job loss, change of heart, etc. To help you remain detached, it can be a good idea to find a new skill either related to your field or utterly different from your area to learn in case a pivot is needed. The less you rely on the identity of “I am a lawyer, I am a nurse, etc.” the better. This pandemic has taught us that you can be in a “traditional“ profession and still lose your job due to different opinions about body autonomy choices. In this society, once you are labeled as a thing, and you attach your ego to being that thing, it’s harder to let go of that thing, even when the change is for the betterment of your well-being.
Concept: I am who I am with and without my relationship
Another area where detachment can be practiced is when you are in a relationship or dating others. I know I may be ruffling a few feathers here, so I will tread lightly…
I want to start by acknowledging that having a relationship with a partner who loves and cares for you is beautiful and should be treasured. Knowing you can count on someone to help you weather the storms can also be instrumental to keeping peace of mind. However, be careful not to lose your identity or solely base your identity on having that relationship. Instead, try to maintain activities outside of your partner solely for your entertainment so that you can remember who you are and what you like without influence. Then when you come back home or get together with your partner, you can have activities to discuss and share with them!
The idea of being detached from the outcome of your relationship can be scary because you want to believe that they will be with you forever and ever, like in the movies! I am a romantic comedy fan, so trust me, I can relate! But if you think about it, even in those movies, you only get a clip of what happens. You see the couple fights and makeup, and then you see THE END of the film. But you never know what happens with that fictional couple after they deal with the main problem in the movie. People grow and evolve; what brought you together at 25 might be irrelevant at 40. Love your partner for who they are, love yourself for who you are separate from the partnership, and love the collaboration for the abundance it brings in your life. Three independent views on the relationship, none of those have to involve basing your happiness and ego on bragging rights of your relationship!
Pro tip: Keep a steady list of the pros and cons of that job or relationship. This is not to hold grudges and shouldn’t be used in place of communicating your needs and being assertive about your goals in relationships and at work. Consider this a tool if you ever face a time when you need to let go of a thing. This can help you stay above water mentally if a breakup or job change is required for your mental health. Now you have reasons to help you see the light and combat you only looking back at the honeymoon phase.
I consider this like looking at a movie screen that only shows a partial picture… an audience doesn’t want to see parts of a film; everybody wants to see the FULL picture screen with all the lights, scenic views, and movie sets to take in the film and give a review.
Also, when nursing your wounds and identifying areas where you can change how you represent and assert yourself, you can use the pros and cons list to have a frame of reference. For example, let’s say you would get annoyed with someone for doing XYZ and share this with them in the relationship, yet nothing changed over a long time. Now you can review this and ask yourself, why did I continue staying in this relationship or working at this place when my needs were not met? What a great journal prompt to use for your personal growth!
Concept: I am who I am with and without others’ validation
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
Social media has been considered a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it’s a great way to stay connected with others and find new information! The curse of social media is that it’s been constructed to perform for others’ acceptance and can be a breeding ground for comparison if you let it. Having a lot of followers and likes on pictures or tweets can provide a false sense of confidence in who you are and what you are doing. Disentangling from the socially accepted meanings of these things can help you show up in spaces authentically and not allow the likes more or less to define you.
Here is another example of reframing my mindset and practicing detachment. I recently got around 3,700 Facebook followers on my blog promo page. This was a major shock and surprise because I marketed using the same ads I created and posted on Pinterest. On Pinterest, I have less than 20 followers but a lot of saves to boards. If I were to attach myself too much to have many followers on Facebook, I would have to give value to having less than that on Pinterest and other social media platforms. Do you see how conflicting and unreliable that is? But if I choose to create my center of happiness and validation that comes from being in tune with God and acting in my purpose, then I can’t be swayed by being attached to the idea of having many followers. Followers can choose to unfollow any day, so being self-reliant and mentally disassociating from the outcomes helps me stay focused on what matters.
This doesn’t mean I’m not happy or celebrating or even that I don’t want followers; that would be disingenuous of me, just more like I can’t let that affect my day-to-day because if I did; how would I have the drive to continue writing and sharing my thoughts? Validate YOU for yourself so that you aren’t reliant on what other people think about you! If you want my top 3 keys to loving yourself unconditionally, read this blog post.
Essentially detachment is about honoring yourself, your needs, and your peace. Detaching from identities means I am a valuable person who can be happy without that job, relationship, or colossal social media following. I wrote this post to illustrate what detachment means to me and how the meaning can be used for you daily. This topic has inspired me, so stay tuned for my next blog post on the relationship between an abundance mindset and detachment!
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Chamillionaire information sources:
Chamillionaire. (2023, January 25). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chamillionaire
https://medium.com/swlh/how-chamillionaire-became-a-better-entrepreneur-than-rapper-a8846b353976