The Truth About Identity
Part 3 of a Series on Identity
I began this series stating that identity was nudging my mind as a topic I needed to write about. It wasn’t difficult for me to be brutally honest in Losing My Identity, and it wasn’t difficult for me to dig into my personal experiences and studies around the dangers of allowing work to become an identity in Is Your Work Your Identity?. When I was contemplating where I was going to go next, I went back and forth on how to connect the dots between what I have stated as dangers and issues with identity to a TRUTH that I could stand firm on and not feel as though I was selling short.
I believe it is helpful to present information to make you think, to make you question, to make you conscious of an important topic. I do not believe I can force you into a method or a solution that I have found to be my truth on such a topic as identity. It goes beyond science for me. It goes beyond data and research papers. I can’t study dozens of articles and research papers and provide THE TRUTH for you. It is deeper. It is personal. I’ll go out on a limb and call it Spiritual.
If reading this content is helpful and your heart is open to my personal experiences, then it was designed for you to encounter this content. If not, it wasn’t meant to be. There is freedom in being vulnerable and courage in accepting the reactions. That is what my inside-out wellbeing journey is all about. I will be an open book for anyone my life may feed, even in just one post or one sentence, and I will pray for everyone else.
Here are a few truths that I can state, and I will end with the truth that I have found as a source of identity. If nothing else, maybe if I am vulnerable, honest, authentic and true, it will inspire you to approach life in the same manner.
IDENTITY IS NOT AN END
One of the primary truths that I believe can set a lot of people free is to understand that your identity is not a destination. It is not an end in itself. It is a journey - it molds, morphs, bends, grows, adapts, and reacts to life and relationships.
Releasing the misconception that you are an identity that cannot be threatened or changed only limits your growth. It will create extreme difficulties as you walk through life engaging with other people and circumstances that may challenge your identity. The happiest, most well-rounded, interesting, and seemingly healthy people I have met in life are open to change and growth and they don’t take their identities too seriously.
A couple of questions to contemplate:
What leads (or pulls) the journey of your identity?
Is your identity pouring out from the inside or is it pulled and pushed from the outside?
REFLECTIONS
The way you experience the world is crucial to your identity, but your identity wouldn't really matter if there were no other people to experience it and shape it and let you reflect upon it.
As I mentioned in Losing My Identity and Is Your Work Your Identity?, your identity is dependent upon other people in some shape or form. It is true that we shouldn’t be subjected to complete dependence on any one person or group of people to find or maintain our identity (just as I stated we shouldn’t put all of our identity into our work), but there simply cannot be a definitive sense of worth and self if it is not in relation to anyone else. (I’m starting to realize the validity of the movie “Cast Away”, and perhaps I would also identify myself in relation to a basketball if in such a lonely and isolated scenario.)
So what does this mean? We can’t find our identity by looking inside ALONE.
As the adage goes: We are not who we think we are. We are not who other people think we are. We are often who we think other people think we are.
We all look for our identity in something outside of ourselves. Our work, our looks, our hobbies, our talents, our loves…we look for something horizontally to get a sense of worth and self. We are searching for something to reflect, something to mirror. A human being reflects his/her environment and the context in which he/she is found.
For example, there is a personality test that many corporations use to gain an understanding of the personalities of colleagues. It is always interesting to see how the results may reveal exactly what a person thinks about themselves while their colleagues may have a completely different perspective of their personality. This tells me that we can have different identities in different environments. A person may be outgoing and confident at work, while they are an introvert when they are back in their family dynamic. A person may be one person in the office, and a completely different person at happy hour with friends. Both of these identities can describe this person, or one of the identities is inauthentic and will create dissonance and an internal battle.
I took the test this week and my result was the Protagonist. Makes sense to me! Maybe someone I know would disagree with that result from their personal experience with me. Who knows? I believe our identities are so complex and so malleable that we cannot be boxed into one understanding or one assessment result, but it is interesting and revealing as to your personality tendencies.
Protagonists are natural-born leaders, full of passion and charisma. Forming around two percent of the population, they are oftentimes our politicians, our coaches and our teachers, reaching out and inspiring others to achieve and to do good in the world. With a natural confidence that begets influence, Protagonists take a great deal of pride and joy in guiding others to work together to improve themselves and their community.
If interested, I have added a link to the test under “Assessments” on my Resources page. It is educational and informative to see your results and read the strengths and weaknesses. I am sure you’ll learn something interesting.
Here is a snapshot of the different groupings and the personalities within each group:
This external reality of identity formation combined with internal desires, natural talents, and individual character results in a piece of art that is a personal identity. The internal understanding will constantly be supported and nurtured or threatened and damaged by the external influences it encounters. The balance of this dynamic is why identity needs to be treated as an ever-changing growth factor.
BE A STUDENT
As I noted before, identities should not be an end. We need to approach life as students open to learn, change, and grow. We must self-identify as a student in all things - especially those things in which we want to engage full-heartedly.
Only when we approach life enthusiastically, passionately, and consciously can we get all of the good stuff out of it. We don’t have to make good things ultimate things, but we can make life ultimate by opening up, embracing our vulnerabilities, and having an open heart to learn. It will also grow compassion and empathy as we openly embrace other people and all that they have to offer.
VERTICAL TRUTH
Here is where I am going to share beyond the science and learnings I have gathered about identities. This is the personal, the Spiritual element, that I mentioned. Proceed at your own risk... 😊
I believe as humans we will always be at risk of putting something in first position to find our identity, which will always put us at risk of an inevitable identity crisis. The balancing act of all of the horizontal influences is extremely hard to manage.
I was contemplating the recommendation to have a diverse and well-rounded identity built upon relationships to others, your talents, your passions, your interests, and your experiences. But, that seemed as though I would basically be telling people to water down or monitor their horizontal life to ensure that nothing becomes too foundational. That didn’t sit well with me from my own experience. The solution would leave me stressed in my own perfectionist recovery to diversify my life and monitor my passions. It would create a new standard that would become its own idol and stressor in my life. Anything I am challenged to do, or whatever I set my mind to, has the potential of becoming an idol.
As I have stated before, I am a Christian. Meaning I follow Jesus Christ as my blueprint for life, and he is the saving grace of my inside-out journey. I will not dive into further religious interpretations of that single truth as I believe that is where so many of the Christian faith followers have fallen off course in trying to “sell” more than the good news of Jesus. If I were not to state this truth boldly and with firm conviction, you should ask yourself what kind of person I am. If my purpose in writing is to share content in an effort to assist others in their inside-out wellbeing journey, how could I hold a truth in my heart that I believe to be the answer and NOT share it? That would make me a hypocrite.
If we are honest, we often feel insecure about our identity. It seems as though it is always on quicksand due to the very real external influences. Those who hide it best with a masked insecurity often feel it most. I believe our insecurity is an invitation from God to escape the danger of false beliefs about who we are and find true peace in who he is. Rather than searching endlessly horizontally, it is a vertical solution. Instead of looking for creation to define yourself, look to the creator to help you find who he created you to be. This reveals who you are meant to be internally and externally. If all of creation reflects its creator, why would we not be a part of that?
I believe we are each uniquely designed with individual talents, characteristics and personalities and our fingerprint was designed to be in the exact context in which we find ourselves. The same God who created each of us uniquely also designed our environment and relationships with perfect precision to create something TRULY unique. No one else has the same combination of internal and external. Isn’t that beautiful?
Ultimately, in community with God and how he created us and our surroundings, we find our self.