identity crisis.

I wrote this in response to the question "Is Identity real?" after a series of discussions on identity, power, cultural capital, character and agency.

“Alex thought of all the parties she’d ever gone to where the first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that was enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wound one day and heal the next.” –Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes

            This is a quote I have saved in a growing document of favorite quotes from one of my favorite authors. What you do, who you know, what you like, etc IS enough to define you, but that doesn’t mean it should be.

I have decided that Identity is like a Subway sandwich. There is no “real” subway sandwich. Let’s say that your Subway sandwich favorite is the meatball sub. But in reality, every single Subway meatball sub is going to be different. It might be the same ingredients, but the person who made it is different, the Subway you bought it at is different, the ingredients were prepared differently or may even come from somewhere different.

            I made a laundry list of all the nouns and adjectives that I have ever been, am currently and could possibly be. I was surprised to see how many of those nouns directly contradicted themselves- a believer and a doubter, a student and a teacher, a girlfriend and an ex-girlfriend, an advice-giver and advice-receiver.

Identity is relative. Identity is evolving and changing. Identity is contextual. In part, your identity is your mold. The perception of your identity is more powerful than your performance because you are always either living up to it or trying to escape it. The nouns in my identity that I was, for example, a private school student, are just as important to my identity as the nouns I am currently and the nouns I will become. In one sense, I will no longer have “student” in my line as employment, but I will always be a learner and someone will always be teaching me. Perhaps the portions of my identity from my past are more relevant than the portions in my present… they both play significant roles in where my identity is going to be in the future.

Some of the words I wrote down I realized were arguable depending on who saw the list. For example, to someone who doesn’t drink, is a former alcoholic or is against drinking- I could be considered a borderline alcoholic. To most college students, I don’t drink enough. Does that mean I am a borderline alcoholic or a college student? I wrote down “drinker” just to settle my internal dispute. In this sense, identity is extremely sensitive to perception and opinion in terms of the degree. This makes the importance of the perception that much more powerful.

This laundry list I created coexists simultaneously meaning something different in each different context and time, meaning something different to everyone who knows you, including yourself. So yes, its “real,” but its abstract, fleeting, and constantly changing.