“The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson
I got carded at the grocery store buying non-alcoholic seltzer. It made me chuckle. Besides the fact that I wasn’t buying booze, it’s painfully obvious that I’m well over 21. And then I starting thinking about ID — short for identification. There’s been a whole lot of chatter about how we identify ourselves and each other, sometimes to include but usually to exclude and persecute.
We act like identity is set in stone, when in reality, the only identity that is completely unchangeable, at least at this point in technological advances, is that of “Homo sapiens.” (On a side note, did you know that we share almost 99% of our genetic code (DNA) with chimpanzees and bonobo monkeys?)
Throughout life we’re assigned a descriptor, or a diagnosis, or a denigrating term that’s painful or unpleasant, and instead of shaking it off, we lean into it. Did you get called “dumb” or “stupid” in elementary school? “Tomboy” or “nerd”? Did you adopt that as part of your identity? I know a lot of kids who did.
We identify as Broncos fans, or Christians (with a qualifier of whatever subset to which you belong), or according to the political party of the season. Aren’t we glad the “Whigs” and the “Know Nothing Party” disappeared? (Or did it?)
Why do we do this? Because we are social creatures who want to belong to something bigger than ourselves. We’re mostly well-dressed herd animals who don’t like being alone, so we adopt identities to “fit in.” It’s like the literary trope of the “no girls allowed” club. By excluding the girls, the boys found a group identity to bond around.
The very real drawback is that the more we identify with a label and exclude those who don’t share the same identifier, the smaller and poorer our lives become. Why? Because there’s no end to the whittling down of identity. We keep adding new restrictions until we’ve successfully accomplished the very thing our primal selves were trying to avoid: solitude and isolation.
Choose and integrate your identifiers carefully. You get to decide who you are. Not what everyone else says about you.