Who am I?

It's an interesting question and one I did not expect to be asking at 31, but listening to Mrs. P on NPR this morning got me thinking about this question again.

I don't have an answer and it makes me a bit peeved with myself. I remember being so self-assured in my early 20s. The combination of my religion, which I no longer espouse, and the warrior mentality that propelled me out of poverty gave me a sense of deep purpose. But the need to fight everyone and everything has dissipated in the wake of having reasonable financial comfort provided by the one person in my life I can count on, my spouse. He worships me and it is so easy to bask in that reflected glow, to get lost in it.

But surely I am more than what one man thinks of me; or is that alone enough? I want more than this, but I can't imagine that more is any better than what I have. When you add to this my current professional dissatisfaction with the one thing I used to be amazing at, it is difficult to evaluate who I am and what I am worth.

Do I push through professionally and keep slogging away at it, believing that this hatred of my profession is a small moment brought on by the stresses of graduate school? This seems to be what the successful students seem to do. But how do they know this? Why does the system have to be designed to make you feel lower than the dust of the earth? How is that empowering me to do great things?

Does my profession even need to factor in to who I am as a human being? I feel like people who base their lives on their job or social position seem somehow more disappointed when things work out than people who don't. But don't you need a bit of this in order to be passionate about your job?

The most frustrating part of this situation is that I don't see a solution. I neither want to be simply a spouse of my biggest fan, or simply a professional in my field. I want value outside of these things and I don't have any idea how one achieves that.