I don’t know who I am. I’m sitting the other day at my computer ready to write out another ponderous, grumbling, rambling post for this blog when I receive a text invite from a friend to join Clubhouse. My initial intrigue turns to befuddlement. When setting up a profile, I am prompted to use my real name and to describe myself. I halt as I realize I did not know what name or description to put into the app.
I have a plethora of nicknames, pseudonyms, and usernames that I shuffle through online and in real life. I do this because I am constantly bounding between vastly different worlds. I am black. I work on Wall St. In my free time I avidly read, write, and paint. I help run two burgeoning side businesses. I am a former athlete. I interlope in the improv and stand-up comedy scene in NYC. I am Jewish. And I freely and wantonly bound from one facet or one life to another, puckishly picking up and placing down who and what I am as I see fit.
In trying to collapse down into a single tangible thing I come abysmally short. I do not have one defining trait or idea. And it seems without either of those in American society today, I do not know who I am. I am having an identity crisis in that I do not want to abide singularly or restrict and attach myself to any one identity.
An identity to me feels like a definition. It feels binding. An attempt to fit the wholeness of being into a trite one- or two-word label. Identities and labels allow people to group themselves – to fit into boxes. Often these boxes are pre-formed based on rather small or one-dimensional aspects of their lives. Think of political beliefs, skin color, sexual activity, profession, hobby, dietary preference - these rather coincidental aspects whether connate or by choice, when they are used as an identity, come to dominate and direct the whole of a person’s life.
What do these labels offer? Cui bono? Why would someone ever do this to themselves? Identities proffer a prepackaged life. A person steps into an identity and instantly receives a predefined manner for how to act, what to believe, where to go, and what to say. For political labels especially, the thoughtlessness is preeminent. I identify ideologically as x – so I should abide by a, b, and c. But it is not strictly bound to politics. Think of whenever you have heard someone say:
“As a conservative I believe...”
“As a liberal I believe in…”
“As a libertarian I…”
“As an American I…”
“As a Presbyterian I...”
“As an atheist I…”
“As a woman I…”
Fill in the blank. Adherence to a school of thought transplants someone else’s ideas as one’s own - inauthenticity through and through. Perhaps an identity offers perfect alignment and coherence of beliefs, thoughts and actions – but one of the great treasures of life is the ability to be on some level contradictory and multifaceted - to tackle different issues in different manners. Why iron out a perfectly wrinkled, entangled, and disjointed life?
Identity is a voluntary relinquishing of self-determination and volition, redolent of herd mentality and group think. Why would a person ever want the traits of the group to determine how one can live? Identity in all its nebulous meanings seems an utterly cheap and baseless way in which to direct one’s life.
When it comes to certain sets of identities, actions or even hobbies have usurped the self in today’s world. People will shape personalities around playing video games, exercising, or even preferred sexual activity. Homosexual acts have occurred in nearly every culture and society throughout history; but having one’s identity defined by sex-life is a much more recent post-enlightenment adaption. Quite honestly, having the essence of my being tied to what I do with my genitals feels abhorrently constricting to the point of suffocation – but something in my gut tells me I am being too dismissive of history and social context here. In this circumstance the individual does not elect an identity, but has it forced upon him or her from an outside force. And perhaps in this regard identity is not baseless.
My father is nearly 70 years old and has dark black skin – he integrated his high school. When walking to school in 1960’s Philadelphia he would circumvent certain predominantly caucasian neighborhoods and streets because he would get chased and beat up by groups of white kids if caught walking alone. He knows what it is like to live in fear because of skin color. To this day, before ending any phone call, he always tells me to “watch my back” – three words with the weight of a life behind them.
I take pause at this thought – blackness like many other identities is something foisted onto the subject. The concept of race is an unfounded fiction, enacted centuries ago to classify and ultimately subjugate. The very fact that an identity can be forced onto a person is the root of why I still have a high ambivalence about rushing to embrace identities. If a group wants to use identity to force a person into an oppressive hole, I do not necessarily understand how accepting and co-opting their judgement is the best path forward – ensuring that the externally imposed identity comes to define you.
This is not a blithe call to deny the realities of the world. I am tall, I was born tall, and I come from a line of tall antecedents. Because I am tall I often have to stoop or duck to avoid a low hanging branch or doorway. In the same way that it would be ridiculous me to go around smacking my head because I wanted to ignore differences in height – it would be ridiculous for me to say that we should ignore race. Race is deeply intertwined in the history of this nation and cannot be casually wiped from memory, it unfortunately also has very real implications in our present day. However, in the same way that it would be ridiculous to form an identity or for me to craft and tailor every essence of myself around my height, it is equally ridiculous and self-thwarting to allow race to be the determinant of my being.
I am far from conflicted here – I highly prize black culture and all it symbolizes as a beautiful overcoming to horrific obstacles - but I also hesitate to blindly assume an identity of blackness that has been used by politicians for coercion and empowerment, by corporations to instill habits of sybaritic consumerism over enfranchisement and wealth generation, and by social theorists to promote an obsession with maudlin victimhood and oppression over fostering ableness and entitlement. Racial identity as a concept and in practice has become muddled by political grandstanding, academic theory, and corporate profiteering. Blackness as an identity was thrust upon people of African descent as a means to other and enslave them. Why is doubling down on a grouping that’s meant to be oppressive the right path forward especially when it has been co-opted in these ways?
Society can put a scarlet letter on a group who has some arbitrary shared characteristic. They can attempt to deride and deprive them. But when that group willingly begins to allow that scarlet letter to determine how and why they exist, then they have been hoodwinked into self-mutilation under the guise of overcoming.
One day in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college I found my mother laying facedown in the living room of her apartment with an empty bottle of pills by her side. I have always admired my mother. She attended art school at 18, transitioned to being an architect at 25, graduated from medical school at 35, got her MBA at 52 and became the Chief Medical Officer for a health insurance company at 55. She has this multitude of achievements and experiences yet she speaks of her psychiatry as if it is who she is. “I am depressed.” “I am sick.” “I am mentally ill.” Sitting and listening to her speak I recognize that she doesn’t have an ailment as much as she has an identity.
Identities in this way aren’t prepackaged lives so much as they are little hiding places. My mother could burrow inside one of them and never have to reveal who she was – to herself or others. I think she and many people like her find these constraining places freeing.
People form identities around being sick, and/or being a patient in the same manner as they would a profession or sexual identity. They allow it to subsume who they are and all that they do. Maybe people do this because it gives answers to many things that otherwise they would have to figure out themselves. Maybe people flock to identities because they give answers to things that are unanswerable. Identities entail a level of certainty – they are a promise. A person may not have it all figured out but if they join up with others at least they can be wrong together.
Identities allow for ease and efficiency. If we both agree to abide by identities – even if not the same one – then we don’t have to expend the effort and energy to deal with messy and convoluted psyches. While employed on Wall St. I have dated and fallen in love with a socialist and anti-capitalist. I lived for three months with a family that hung a blue lives matter flag outside their house – and while I would otherwise easily dismiss them as boot-licking authoritarian statists, they still welcomed me to their dinner table every night knowing I held beliefs antithetical to them. This isn’t a fucking kumbaya song – I don’t believe deep down we’re all the same or some equivalent bullshit. But, labels enable people to blithely deal and interact with superficial, one-dimensional tags rather than humans – interact with things instead of people. Identities sterilely flatten relationships, and though this proves efficient it’s also dilutive. There’s a magnificence to the indefinable that a label will either shroud or eliminate. There is something to be said about not having the words to say something.
Maybe a great number of people – perhaps even the majority – need a prepackaged identity. I don’t have delusions that all people are innately of equal potential. Maybe some do not have the ability to create their own selves or their own lives. This is not a (self-aggrandizing) judgement per se just a non-value adding observation. Perhaps a society could not stand if everyone sought out their own distinctions – the sum of many ones being a zero. Perhaps there are just plainly a lot of persons who wholeheartedly are duplicates of other folks.
I try to not do grand scheme fixes - in my eyes it falls to the individual to self-reflect and determine his or her own want for individualism versus commonality. This whole rant is, if anything, most revealing of who I am. I can lambaste other people for wanting to conform – but maybe I am arriving at sour grapes for something I simply cannot have. Perhaps I have a disorder – words like cohesion makes my skin itch. I have an allergy to deference and agreement in general. The thought of not being in the driver’s seat of my own life elicits something between nausea and agony for me, a sharp feeling just to the left of my liver. For this reason, I don’t abide by labels and I cannot determine a simple identity for myself. Without them – I feel liberated to live and craft my life however I see fit.
I’m having an identity crisis: I don’t know who I am. But I know I’m having a blast with life and couldn’t imagine living any other way. Would you want to join me?
Made me think of something Huey P. Newton said
“One day I suddenly realized I had forgotten, name age sex address race, I had found myself
What is greater than love or hate, I will tell you then,
what is greater than love is the relationship I have with the tip of my finger.
Want me to break it down? I can break it down.
It's a simple concept.
If I define myself as my thumb, I deny myself my fingers.
If I define myself as my fingers, I deny myself my hand.
If I define myself as my hand, I deny myself my arm.
If I define myself as my arm, I deny myself my body.
If I define myself as my body, I deny myself my universe.
I diminish myself.
+++
I do not know enough about myself, because you do not know
enough about yourself, would you help me know?”
A very thought-provoking read