Unaffiliated
A few days ago I had an interesting discussion in a class. Dr. Pickett spends most of the class psychoanalysing his students or the authors we read, and Thursday was no different. The discussion centered around identity, and what makes us us. My Dad instilled in me a skeptical view of people who try to "find themselves" or discover who they really are by throwing of the shakles of their daily life, relationships and work. These are the things that, for better or worse, make us who we are, and getting rid of them will not free you, you will merely replace them with a new version of the same.
That got me thinking. Maybe the search for identity is really pointless. You are something, so why the need to be defined? Why should I care if people think of me as an intellectual, or a teacher, or a weirdo, or a homeschooler? I either am those things or I am not, and I'm probably some of all of it. The need to be defined by one aspect of your personality, your work, your school, or your significant other seems to come out of an insecurity with being a bizarre conglomeration. Well we are all bizarre.
I want to remain unaffiliated.
That got me thinking. Maybe the search for identity is really pointless. You are something, so why the need to be defined? Why should I care if people think of me as an intellectual, or a teacher, or a weirdo, or a homeschooler? I either am those things or I am not, and I'm probably some of all of it. The need to be defined by one aspect of your personality, your work, your school, or your significant other seems to come out of an insecurity with being a bizarre conglomeration. Well we are all bizarre.
I want to remain unaffiliated.
posted by Cate at 11:42 AM
2 Comments:
That was very insightful. I am sure your father will enjoy the hat tip since he has used that onion illustration so many times....
I think that this is the problem with appearances. We put a disproportionate weight on evaluating someone by what we see visually when it is really plays such a small part in the truly interesting and identifying parts of a person. One becomes particularly sensitive to this with age. I forget that I am walking around with this ageing body when I am seeing out of increasingly interesting eyes.
One of the problems is that it's part of our human nature to attach our identity to whatever it is that we are doing. Probably part of the grand search for meaning in life, because if we have an identity then that means that we have formulated (or discovered?) a context within which we have a definable place. And that means we're important.
Maybe this whole identity crisis comes from our inability to cope with the fact that there are so many people in the world, and that some of us are bound to have similar abilities/talents/roles. We just want to be special.
Oh, the angst. :-/
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