Identity seems to be an all encompassing word, it is able to capture a person’s essence, vocation, purpose and worth all into a couple, at best a single word. When I say I am a dancer, I wear it like a badge, a statement. But over time it slowly evolves into a shield and a gilded cage. Under it’s deceptive covering, like a formidable bastion, it seeks to not only keep my raw intuitive need for exploration in, but also keep what is waiting for me on the outside out, effectively shutting off communication from both sides.
The fear of not having a well defined identity can be frightening. Shedding the hide of my past identification as a dancer, left me exposed, naked and vulnerable to the elements of the world. I can no longer use it as a refuge against the inevitable pain of growth and change.
Without my identity as a dancer, I seem to be no longer me, and every morning I look into the mirror, I see a different stranger everyday. Having to reluctantly welcome this person and to forge an uneasy companionship, is like going through the process of befriending myself again. Only to realise how little I know about this person without the guise of a dancer and how much we have drifted apart since the time I fell in love with dancing. Walking through the first gateway to befriending myself comes from a place of wanting to name myself again, something other than a dancer. And ironically, on that journey to trying to find a name, I have come to realise, that maybe I don’t need a name.
Humans are a seasonal, dynamic, malleable entity. Just like I am no longer the person I was last year and no more the same person I was twenty four hours ago. The undercurrent of my experiences, pulls me along with time, constantly building up and crumbling what I think I know about myself. And an attempt to put a name on this identity can only shutdown any potential conversation with the imaginative future that I could have and could never capture the whole spectrum of my identity.
Learning to take pride in a multi paradigm identity can be challenging when facing my cynical self, that wants me to be named and lord that name over everyone I meet. I find it amusing in my anxiety when I cannot find a name for myself. Or when I see the awkward reaction of someone, mirroring my exact sense of disorientation before changing the subject hastily so as to avoid the cumbersome conversation. As history has repeatedly demonstrated, our true identities often remain elusive until the day we breathe our last breath. And even then it continues to evolve just like the complex and multifaceted legacy of Cleopatra or like how Kafka’s works emerged only after his death. And so, it is comical to realise that in my impatience, what I want would be to get closer to death, despite the whole purpose of a human existence is to repel that.
However, to be caught in the suffocating middle of wanting to be named but wanting to be left alone tell me that perhaps we are very much nomadic. Constantly moving, searching, like migratory birds, arriving and leaving. Always on the verge of discovery, but with every disappearance of a constantly changing self, never truly knowing, but constantly staying close to who we want to be and who we think we are.
Learning to accept and let go has allowed me to see the beauty in the changing world and open to the different conversations that calls and beckons me in all different directions. And instead of fear, I now feel excitement and anticipation to answering those calls and most importantly, open to the vulnerabilities that comes along with.
Another way of looking at identity can almost be the inverse of naming, of not being named. Like cathedral builders in the middle ages, creating these incredible pieces of architecture that till this day takes our breath away when we come face to face with it’s majestic facade. Built by countless of people whose names we do not know, over so many years, their unknown legacy embedded in each carving of every piece of stone. And what is left behind remains a masterpiece, a culmination of so many people’s lives. Therefore, despite the rise of the Main Character Syndrome, perhaps our best efforts lie in embracing cathedral thinking.
Having a strong identity sometimes becomes synonymous with having strong beliefs. Having strong beliefs can help us overcome the hardest periods in life, keeping us grounded and creating an anchor for the sails of our ambitions to fly. A strong belief creates a strong motivation, a generating force that powers the imagination of human race making the impossible to the possible. Creating great inventions, cities and civilisations.
However, just like the way we reel back a kite from flying too far or too high, holding on the never changing strong beliefs are what keeps us from maturing and perhaps causes us to regress back to our once narrow worldview of a child, where we believe the world can and only work in a certain way. A stubbornly strong belief can also seek to fragment relationships and alienate us from others. What I believe is the way to live a good life differs to what you believe is the way to live a good life, even if we both belief we are living good lives. What is my imagination of god differs from your imagination of god, even if we all believe in god. Our strong overly developed beliefs become a shield and a weapon for our own unconvinced beliefs, to protect our own egos and to hurt others to prove to ourselves that our beliefs are right.
To be generous with our beliefs or with the efforts to understand is difficult, stretching our already overwhelmed minds to comprehend the seemingly incomprehensible, would be akin to deconstructing one’s identity. Together with the trend to simplify everything into fifteen second reels, we lose the capacity to delve deeper. The easier to understand something the better, the simpler it is to categorise myself or someone else, the less I have to go through the disconcerting process of confronting my entrenched beliefs.
By contemplating and relinquishing what we have previously held on too tightly, like the release of a breath and the autonomic intake of the next, what comes back to us is a multi-layered spectrum of ideas and thoughts, and is also what is necessary for our continual survival in this ever changing world. The interweaving of what I believed before and what I have come to understand creates a new frontier for exploration. Little seeds of imaginative ideas and thoughts are then given room to grow so that what I used to believe is crazy or impossible, once given ample care and attention, will eventually bloom. And ironically, then given a name.
Image: Flutter by Henrik Uldalen Metanoia series. https://www.henrikaau.com
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