Identity Crisis

When the Lord wants to get at something, He can find more ways to get at it than anyone I know of, and this time around, it was identity. Who is Charissa? That was the question. Of course, I didn’t realize that was the question until the test was over! (Sometimes it would be so much simpler if I knew it was a science test I was taking …)

The discomfort began when someone hinted that a song I’d recorded would have been better some other (unspecified) way. Some other style or something. Then a friend was telling me some things about herself, that were much different than my own tastes and experience. Then a businessman was making some broad hints about how one of my brothers ought to do things in his business. All three of those things disturbed me, but I wasn’t quite sure why. It’s very easy for me to assume I’m in the wrong every time my feelings are disturbed … and these were affecting me pretty heavily.

For one thing, my life had gotten out of balance. When I’m not making serious connection with my Life Source, everything is going to get out of whacsk—that’s a given. But in addition to that, I had lost sight of who I was; I’d lost sight of why I do what I do.

In this crisis, I began to see some things more clearly than I had before. I realized that a song is like a baby: you may name it as you please, and dress it as you please, and raise it as you please, but you can’t pick its gender or its personality. Some stuff is what it is. I’ve written songs that were born country; I’ve written songs that were born calypso. Some are born fast, some slow. Others were late bloomers, and didn’t take on a strong identity until I’d worked with them a bit. I do my best with them, but my aim isn’t to please the world … or even a few people in the world. My aim is to give what I have been given. If you can receive it, you’ll be richer for it. If not, maybe the next one will strike you—or maybe none at all will.

I saw, too, that what someone else has experienced and what someone else is called to and what someone else likes has nothing to do with me. I knew that already, of course, but I saw it even more clearly. God has called me to do certain things, and He has programmed the ideal settings into me. I’m a natural at His calling, you might say—at least in some respects. In my own mind, I had to define myself. "This is me. This is what I do. That is not me, and I don’t like that."

It may not be over yet, but I can see myself so much more clearly, now, than I did before this identity crisis.

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