Clive

Outdoor dining at a nice downtown restaurant on a pleasant summer evening can add that little something extra to a night out on the town. The only thing that could possibly make it better would be live entertainment — and by live entertainment I mean a crazy homeless guy who looks like he was just put through a paper shredder, smells like a garbage truck, and is punching a tree and threatening your very existence while you decide whether or not you should have coffee with your dessert. Now that’s what I call ambiance.

The downtown area was still hopping at midnight with diners and bar-hoppers as I loaded my patrol bag into my cruiser. Weekends in the summer were always busy right out of the gates. My patrol route covered the inner city and bordered the downtown area ensuring I would have plenty to do. After signing in on my MDT the calls starting populating on my screen and it was time to begin clearing them out.

Not So Fast

There was a call for a disorderly homeless guy harassing diners at a nice downtown restaurant. It had been holding for a while so I figured that he would have moved on by now and an easy call to clear. As I rolled by the area and picked up the mic ready to announce G.O.A., there he was in all his vagrant glory, screaming from across the street at the horrified diners.

This guy was gone all right, but not in the literal sense.

He was pacing in circles having an animated shouting contest at no one in particular. He had wild, curly hair like 1980s Weird Al Yankovic (only worse), a creepy mustache, and less teeth than the front row at a demolition derby. He wore an oversized trench coat, dirty high top sneakers with no laces, and knit fingerless gloves.

I pulled over and mentally warmed up for what was sure to be an epic battle of verbal Judo — hoping that’s all it would be.

With roughly 30 employed, tax-paying, normal people looking, on I took a deep breath and tried starting a conversation with this gentleman who minutes before had apparently gone full Sugar Ray Leonard on a helpless maple tree that adorned the sidewalk. As I walked up I noticed blood had soaked through the knit glove on his right hand and was running down the tips of his fingers.

Clive

I recognized him as one of our regulars but I couldn’t remember his name. My goal was to try to draw him back to reality from wherever he currently was by using his name so I came up with a clever way of discerning it. I asked him, “Hey man, what’s your name?”

He immediately became furious with me like a dad who’s told his kids a hundred times to change the toilet paper roll but yet again finds himself stranded in the bathroom. He pulled the ratty knit glove off his hand, and showed me his bloodied and swollen knuckles as if it were some form of ID. Unable to recognize the pulpy mess, he glared at me and vehemently pointed to the plastered wall of the business behind him dimly lit by the Victorian street lamps. There, in gigantic crooked letters, was written in blood the name Clive.

For some inexplicable reason he had repeatedly punched the tree until his hand was a bloody mess and then used his knuckles as a paintbrush to write his name on the wall.

Only that wasn’t his name.

Persona

Clive was a persona he took on, most likely from mental illness and compounded by drug and alcohol abuse. It was who he saw himself as or who he chose to present himself to be. Either way, it was not his true self.

Like Bruce Wayne who dons cape and cowl to become the Batman in order to strike fear in the hearts of evildoers everywhere, as officers we don our uniform and we too become a symbol, an ideal, that imbues us with authority and boldness we otherwise would not have. We become something else. But Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker, Clark Kent all end up in conflict with their alter egos. The two separate lives they try to lead clash at various times leaving angst and heartbreak in their wake. The truth is that we face the same fate.

When we wear our uniform — our cape and cowl — we can lose our true self. Since we are built to survive we quickly learn to adapt to fit in and meet expectations within the world of law enforcement but risk losing touch with our own identity. The many hours, days and years of our career can slowly erase the person we once were if we let it. We can end up behaving or living a life that is perpendicular to who God intended us to be.

Whether you are in law enforcement or not, you are not what you do. You are not a cop, a banker, an engineer, a nurse, a cashier, a landscaper, a plumber, or an entrepreneur. You are not a what but a who. For some reason we all get our identities wrapped up in what we do — as if that defines us somehow — whether it was by default or by intention. Not only can we lose who we are when taking on that identity but most crushing of all is when that very identity is lost or destroyed when we are laid off, injured, quit, retire, or get fired. No job lasts forever. Then all we are left with is an empty shell of the person we purported ourselves to be.

Who You Are

In their book The Road Back To You Ian Cron and Suzanne Stabile wrote, “Human beings are wired for survival. As little kids we instinctively place a mask called personality over parts of our authentic self to protect us from harm and make our way in the world … Our personality helps us know and do what we sense is required to please our parents, to fit in and relate well to our friends, to satisfy the expectations of our culture and get our basic needs met. Over time … we can’t tell where they end and our true natures begin. Ironically, the term personality is derived from the Greek word for mask (persona), reflecting our tendency to confuse the masks we wear with our true selves …Worst of all, by overidentifying who we are with our personality we forget or lose touch with our authentic self…”¹

They go on to quote theologian, writer, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Frederick Buechner who said, “The original, shimmering self gets buried so deep that most of us end up hardly living out of it at all. Instead we live out all the other selves, which are constantly putting on and taking off like coats and hats against the world’s weather.”

The Enneagram

The Road Back To You is a book all about the Enneagram, an ancient personality typing system that divides personalities into nine types designed to help people understand who they are and what makes them tick. If you don’t understand yourself you cannot begin to fix your broken parts or capitalize on your strengths. You will be unaware of your tendencies and triggers. Though the Enneagram is not an oracle or a be-all-end-all, it is a model and a tool that will lead you to better understand who you are and why you do what you do.

Gaining a better understanding of ourselves allows us to identify our strengths and weaknesses as they are and not as we wish them to be so that we can move toward becoming the best version of our true selves, better understand others, and strengthen our relationships. But please don’t think I have this all figured out — far from it (just ask my wife).

I think that distinguishing between who we are and what we do is critical to a more stable, consistent, resilient life. It’s time for you and me to better understand ourselves so that our uniform does not become our mask and we stop defining ourselves by the job we do. Beware, there’s a Clive that lives in all of us.

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• Do you change personas from one environment to another?
• Are you able to identify your own true strengths and weaknesses?
• Do you define yourself by what you do?
• What can you do to better understand yourself?

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¹Ian Cron and Suzanne Stabile, The Road Back To You: An Enneagram Journey To Self-Discovery (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2016), pp 22-23.