'Be yourself - everyone else is taken’

This week’s INM/Mediahuis Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

Tell the truth, would you like to be someone else?

Over the last few months I have been watching closely events unfolding in Ukraine and how Ukrainian people, who have found refuge in Ireland, are coping. 

Their lives have been turned upside-down, many have lost family and friends, all their possessions. And yet I guess if any one of them were asked would they like to be someone else they would say no.

When people ask me if I got a second chance would I live my life differently I hesitate and probably say I’d do this or that differently but not for a million years would I like to be someone else. In many senses it is a silly question. 

We are where we are, and have what we have. It is a matter of making the best of what we have, cultivating our individual potential and running with it. 

Not for a moment am I suggesting we should not have ambition and drive but it’s so easy to fool ourselves by thinking that if we had this or that, if things were different, we’d be a much happier person.

Last week someone said to me that if you put your own troubles in the middle of the road with everyone else’s  you’d take back your own. That’s insightful.

I can give you examples, chapter and verse of people who have loads of money and are not at all happy. I know poor people, sick people who have impressed me with their happiness and contentment.

This life of ours is a gigantic mystery and I am amazed with all the complexities, contradictions and simple mess that I experience all around me. And the mess of my own life too.

That’s why I think we all need props, supports, indeed other people to keep us afloat. After all, we are forever saying that we are social animals. We sure are.

We all need a handrail to grip firmly to keep us on a reasonably steady path. Yes, we can reach to the heights but never forget we are all extremely fragile. 

Pull away the tiniest support and we can suddenly be at sea, lose our way. But even when that happens and the roof falls in on top of us we still never want to be someone else.

In January Ryan Tubridy on his RTÉ radio 1 programme interviewed 43-year-old Sarah de Lagarde, who lost her right leg and arm in a train accident in the London Underground the previous September. 

Listening to her talk I was amazed with her resilience. It sounded as if she had dusted herself down and was getting back to business. There was a great sense of joy and, indeed, contentment in her voice.

Yes, we can go through great trauma, our lives can be greatly damaged but we seem to survive and get on with it. I’ve never yet met a person who genuinely wished to be someone else. 

In preparing this column I asked a number of people would they wish to be someone else. Not one person said they would. 

Quoting Oscar Wilde, indeed, two weeks in a row: ‘Be yourself – everyone else is taken’.

Every one of us has gifts to offer the world. And there are no exceptions, none. The uniqueness of the individual person is really a master act. There is only ever going to be one ‘me’ and one you.