The most popular icebreaker question is the one that causes me the most stress. I’ll admit it: I have absolutely no idea what my spirit animal is. I’ve approached the question from every angle that I could think of. Is it my favorite animal? Bees are my favorite, but I am in no way enough of a team player for that to make sense. Is it the animal that I most resemble? I’ve been told that I look more than a little bit like a quokka, but I feel like this should be about something less superficial than looks. I’m pretty sure that it’s not my go to answer—a caribou—because everyone who I’ve asked has said that they don’t really see it. I just keep optimistically using it because I think caribou are pretty cool. But if it’s none of these, then it’s harder to answer since I see some aspects of myself in a lot of animals.
For example, I keep a lot of things that I think might be useful later (plastic bags, receipts, clothing tags, etc), and end up having small piles of things dispersed around different parts of my room. Sometimes I’m a little optimistic about the usefulness of the things I keep, i.e. I am most likely just collecting and sorting piles of garbage. On this subject the vogelkop bowerbird and I are on the same page. But that seems like a pretty arbitrary lifestyle choice to base something as important as a spirit animal on.
What’s really surprising to me is how often other people have a perfect answer. It’s a big question to ask someone to condense their whole being down to a mascot, and the number of people who successfully do it is pretty incredible. Do these people use some special set of criteria that I just don’t know about? Or is it all intuition? If it is intuition, does that mean that I don’t really know myself if I can’t figure one out? Or is it possible that there is a perfect animal out there for me that I just haven’t heard of yet? The fact that so many other people have found theirs makes me confident that mine is out there. Maybe it’s been right under my nose the whole time, and I just had to do some spirit searching to realize it. Or maybe I just need to sit down and research some obscure animals because my perfect fit is something I don’t know about. The sooner that I can figure this out, the better. I’m tired of being told that I’m not cool enough to be a caribou.
Image via.