In
Parker Palmer’s excerpts from Let Your
Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation, he writes about how we
need to learn to be ourselves. Many people today, especially teenagers,
struggle with this concept. Teenagers, in particular, are often overwhelmed and
are thinking about everything that they have to do. They are under so much
pressure and feel like they need to “fit in.” They often ask themselves, “Who
should I be?” rather than, “Who am I?”
I agree with Palmer when he says, “From the beginning, our lives lay down
clues to selfhood
and vocation, though the clues may be hard to decode.” We all
have a purpose on this earth, and we are all called to do something. Figuring
out what that something is is very difficult. When we are feeling lost, we can
think back to our past and remember what we enjoy about ourselves. While on
this long journey to figuring out who we really are, we grow closer to God and begin
to “decode” our lives. 
