All the roles you play in life are limiting. They may feel limiting at the time you play them. Sometimes other people see you as that role and nothing more.  You might be the job you do, a wonderful parent, a busybody, an anti-social recluse, the other woman, a hopeless alcoholic, a bad son, a gossip, or any other label you have accepted. The roles you play in life can be regarded as costumes your being has decided to try on.

 

Roles are costumes

 

 

 

 

Costumes can be discarded

 

After you have ceased to play a role, sooner or later, it will seem limiting to you. When you have left a role behind, your being expands like a foot growing out of an old shoe. As important as any role may have felt at the time you were playing it, it fails to contain all of who you are.

No role could.

You are more than this. Whether it was a role you enjoyed playing and excelled at, or whether you fought against it in misery, once it is put by, the being transcends it, thereafter looking back as the graduate might look back on nursery school.

 

 

 

You may completely identify with a role yourself: teacher, mother, sailor, athlete. But whether you assume a role joyfully, or resist it mightily, no role is big enough to contain the real you. The real you can choose to perform these functions beautifully, but always remains more than any function.

 

 

 

So examine each role you assume or resist, giving it your loving attention if you so choose, but never forget the real you is larger than any role.

Roles that bring unhappiness or unease however small, must be dropped.

You would not wear a shoe that bothered your foot.

 

 

 

Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy

Johnny Carson