I spend a lot of time thinking about my identity. The person I believe I am. The person whom my family sees. The person my friends see. The person strangers see. The person God wants me to be. And I wonder, at the heart of it all, is there really a true “me,” or am I simply the product of how everyone sees me? It seems like a silly question at first – of course I’m me! – but then I consider how often my actions and choices are influenced by how I want others to perceive me, and I’m not so sure.
I think we all do this to some extent. When we pick what clothes to wear, we consider the activities we may undertake in those clothes, and the people with whom we’ll be spending time with. When we engage in casual conversation with a friend, we talk about things we know are common interests. At our jobs we behave in the manner we want our bosses to see, and to secure a favourable recommendation for when the time arrives to move jobs. Even in our own time, when alone, we read books and watch movies recommended to us by friends, or develop hobby skills that make us feel valued by others or that’ll help to impress a girl we like.
This is all our choice, of course, so these influences are not purely external, but internal as well. For example, I want to be a more sociable person, but that’s not something that comes naturally to me. It’s not an inherent part of my identity, but something I nevertheless want to add to it. Am I thus striving to be something I’m not? Thwarting the age-old relationship advice to simply “be yourself”?
Social connections are intertwined through every facet of our lives, to the point where it becomes hard to see the where the line lies between our perceived identity and our “true” identity, if such a thing exists.
And perhaps this is just me, but when I do spent time on myself, relaxing and doing something I enjoy, it often backfires and ends up making me feel worse, even guilty, for neglecting more important duties. (Nope, it’s not just me.)
When I previously wrote about identity, I began by suggesting our natural inclination is to define ourselves by our external circumstances: occupation, lifestyle choices, the sort of friends we have, and so forth. And the above musings are nothing if not testament to that. But make no mistake, we DO have a “true” identity. This is painfully evident by how we feel when someone gets that identity wrong. Feeling misunderstood is probably the leading cause of bad days for me – days when I’m feeling down, when all the chocolate in the world can’t lift my spirits. It’s a horrible feeling, to think no one “gets” me, and it’s only compounded by my inability to communicate exactly who “me” is (which is correct English, by the way – in this context “me” becomes a proper noun, rather than a pronoun, so it works).
So there’s a real me. And there’s a version of me that other people see. It’s probably even a slightly different version for different people. Now, ideally, those identities would overlap quite significantly, meaning we don’t “pretend” or put on a mask around different people. Because the further our perceived identity deviates from our personal identity, the more misunderstood we’ll feel. We don’t want to feel misunderstood; we want to feel perfectly understood. We want people to recognise that our seemingly-random actions are actually purposeful, and that our peculiarities are rooted in reasons that are perfectly sensible in our own minds. In fact, I believe it is the most basic desire of every single person, to be seen, to be known, to be loved. These things go hand-in-hand: it is impossible to fully know a person and not love them the way they love themselves. (Yeah, I sorta stole that line from Orson Scott Card.)
Of course, we don’t really fully know anyone. We can’t. Only God can. But perhaps we can aspire to come close to that level of connection in just one or two of our closest relationships. If we can do that – if we can strive to understand their identity to the fullest extent of our comprehension (bearing in mind that identity can change with time, so it’ll require a continual effort) – then in doing so we’ll be showing them love, and they’ll be in a position to reciprocate, to meet our own desire to be understood.
And hopefully I won’t feel the need to stay up late musing about identity any more. 😉
Observations 