Wear Out Your Identity

Life is not a Costume Ball

Photo by Federico Scarionati on Unsplash

“While our immutable identity characteristics surely shape us and shouldn’t be erased, they’re hardly everything. What makes us interesting and worthwhile people isn’t the circumstances of our birth — or our disordered psyches — but the choices we make, and the ideas and people that we care about.”

Why I am More and More Ambivalent About My Autism Diagnosis, by Emma Camp, NYT, April 22, 2023

An interesting column in the Times.  I wrote sometime in the past about the dangers of viewing the world through the lens of “identity.”  Such a focus may in fact reawaken in a new guise the negative stereotypes that we have tried to avoid.  That is, it places “the other,” as well as the self, as a special case and unintentionally limits our ability to find common “human” cause with natural allies (allies in shared experience, values and understanding).  We waste time in being a victim, protecting a victim, waging battle alongside a victim and all that goes with agendas of identity politics.

I believe that in this century it is important to shake like a dog coming out of the storm, and shed the trappings of identity. 

And more to the point of this quotation, to make ourselves interesting and worthwhile by the quality of our thinking, by a willingness to learn from new experiences. We are not important because we have held a position, or been tagged with an identity, or been diagnosed with a “condition.”  

However, consoling it might be to have a diagnosis, a registered place in the world, a citizenship in a community, however sure that makes us about who we are and will always be, the reality of life is never the person we have been, but the person that we are free to become.

Sure, we have fixed points.  You are tall and I am short, or impulsive, or reserved.  We may even be able to afford professional diagnostics, and gain admission to a distinctive identity box into which we can climb when the world becomes too demanding.  That is not, as Emma says, what makes us interesting and rarely what makes us useful.