Andrew Kesterson

"Love God. Live Righteously. Die Well."
Source Code || LinkedIn
38 Posts 9 Categories 0 Tags
Categories
Books 14
Philosophy 9
Faith 7
Technology 17
Outdoors 1
Current-Events 7
Leadership 8
History 1
Liberal-Education 1
hot tags

# Just Be Yourself ... Whoever that is

2026-06-30 Philosophy 1.4k words

Some of the best, simplest, and hardest advice I ever got was from a dead man.

When someone dies, we go through many different stages of grief. Denial, Bargaining and Acceptance are relevant here. First we refuse to believe they’re gone, then we try to bargain, to come up with some way to avoid this from being reality. Once we realize we can’t deny it, and we can’t stop it, we must accept it - but accepting that they’re dead doesn’t mean accepting that their life is over. Some of us, in our grief, will attempt to prolong the life of the deceased by carrying on their last mission, to complete it in their honor. If this person had no specific mission, or if this person’s mission was to enable and support the lives of others, we may find ourselves simply trying to live their life for them. Naturally, this is impossible. But that doesn’t stop us from trying.

I found myself in this state some time after my brother James had passed (God rest him). I was trying to pick up martial arts again. I was trying to be more involved in the lives of his children than I was able to. I was trying to keep some of his D&D campaign ideas alive. I was pouring myself into the things he would have done, because I couldn’t bear the idea of him being gone, and as part of that, I couldn’t allow his life to end. But it was unmaintainable. Not to mention the fact that - it wasn’t my life.

It should surprise absolutely nobody that James and I were, for all our similarities and our closeness, very different people. We lead very different lives. Our hobbies and interests overlapped in a few areas, but other than that, we were totally separate people. So not only could I not manage to do live both lives at once for practical reasons, I simply couldn’t bring enough energy and investment to the things I was doing to keep his memory and life alive. At best, it would have been a gross pantomime of his life, a sick zombie choreography of him. His verses were not mine to sing.

I was continually breaking down during this period. I remember, frequently, calling out to him in the darkness, asking for him to give me some kind of sign that he was out there. That he wasn’t really gone forever. I asked him how I could possibly keep going, what I was supposed to do.

We often hope for things like this to get some kind of visible response. Maybe a vivid dream. Perhaps an apparition. Some kind of mystical visit. What we usually get is a deafening, crippling silence. Dead men tell no tales, after all. But I actually got an answer. It was in my head, but it was definitely him, in his voice.

> "Just be yourself." --Ghost Jim

“But who AM I?”, I asked desperately.

I didn’t get a response to that one. I could imagine him lighting a cigarette, taking a drag, shrugging, and fading away. Defining me wasn’t - and never was - his job, even though who he was had become a part of who I was.

A large part of our identity comes not only from ourselves, but from our family, and our position in our family. “Father of X”, “Daughter of Y”, “Cousin of Z”. Once those family ties change, our identity can change with it. If you spend your entire life as “James’ younger brother”, and suddenly, there’s no more James … who are you now?

> "YOU are not your JOB, or how much MONEY you have in the bank!"
> --Tyler Durden

Obviously we are more than the connections in the family graph around us. Sir Anthony Shanander once pondered the question, “who would you be if all this knighthood and chivalry stuff was stripped away?” He struggled with it only a little, and comfortably replied that he “would still be a Child of God”, and that would be his most important core identity. But even that is an expression of a family relationship. Then again, for a Christian, it is also an inalienable definition - God states clearly that He will neither leave us nor forsake us, so it is impossible, once being adopted through baptism, to cease being a Child of God. Even if we flee and squander our inheritance like the prodigal son, and we lose all other titles and even our sense of self, we remain His children.

Even identifying ourselves by what we do is insufficient. That can change over time. Does that change who we are? Aristotle said “you are what you repeatedly do.” Forrest Gump said “Stupid is as stupid does”. I might say “I am a programmer” or “I am a marksman” or “I am a volunteer firefighter”, but are any of those things the core of what I am? Or are they spokes on the wheel of my identity? So while some of our identity does obviously derive from what we do, that can’t be the whole thing.

Who are you if you strip away everything else, and you just look at yourself, bare and naked, nobody around you, away from your job, away from your hobbies. Who are you?

I’ve never been able to really answer that question. The last 10 years of my life have been one long attempt to answer it. Now I’m beginning to wonder if that’s not the wrong way to go about it. Is it actually possible to answer the “Who are you?” question without bringing in your famaily, your actions, your religious beliefs, etc? Without that, are we left with some abstract base class version of yourself that, while technically accurate, is not actually useful as an identifier, and may in fact group you into a class of persons rather than sufficiently distinguishing you as an individual?

Still, trying to follow this advice has lead me to a place where I am much more at peace with myself than before. Part of this process was asking questions like:

- What do I believe?
- Why do I believe it?
- Are those beliefs actually mine?
- What do I do?
- Why do I do it?
- What have I chosen, what have I inherited, and what am I unknowingly assimilating?

James obviously had some idea of who I was, and he believed in it enough to tell me to trust his memory to be carried on the wind of story, and to focus on being myself. He used to say, “You have no idea how proud I am that we are brothers”. I still don’t understand why, but, I’m doing my best to live up to that praise and honor by being the best version of myself I can be. I am doing my best to discover my verse, and to add it to the chorus with his, in my own voice.

Bruce Lee said that, to be a Martial Artist meant “honestly expressing yourself”. He also said that the essence of Jeet Kune Do was to “absorb that which is useful; discard that which is not; add what is uniquely your own”. It’s up to you to figure out what is uniquely your own, and boldly express it.

> Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
> Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
> Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
> Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
> Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
> Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
> The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
> Answer.
> That you are here—that life exists and identity,
> That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
> --Walt Whitman, "O Me! O Life!"

Recent Posts
2026-07-10
News-2026-Week-2
2026-07-09
News - 2026 - Week - 28
2026-06-30
Just Be Yourself ... Whoever that is
2026-06-30
You Cant Go Home Again