Identity

I love it when a book I read leaves me thinking afterwards. "Spirits in the Wires" by Charles de Lint, that I wrote about recently, stayed in my mind for a long time after I read it. I actually read the book over a week ago, and usually my mind has moved on to new things within a day or two, especially when I'm reading other books, but not this time!

I keep coming back to the concept of IDENTITY. Who we are, how we define ourselves, how others define us, mistaken concepts, my own journey...

One of the main forms of identifying ourselves, or others, is the use of labels. It's only natural afterall, the sense of self is a esoteric concept that can't easily be defined, so we start putting lables on it to make it a more tangible concept that we can grasp. The problem with that is that those labels will change over time, and if we've come to find our personal self-worth in them, that can be a painful experience.

I think of myself at 21, and the labels I had attached to myself back then...the list included:

Daughter
Friend
Room mate
Manager
Boss
Swing Dancer

I look at those labels, and out of all of them, the only ones that still apply are daughter and friend! I'm sure if I thought long enough I could come up with more labels, but my life has changed a lot in the last 5 years. Some of those labels I gave up easily, and some of them were quite painful to let go of.

Most recently I had to give up my identity as a college student. It wasn't something I gave up easily, or without good reason, but it was something that had to be done. It was one of the most painful decisions I've made in a long time!

I realized, after the fact, that a part of my struggle in letting go of college was that I had wrapped up a large part of my identity in that label, in being a college student. I had good reason to, I love to learn, and I had worked very hard to get to where I was! But it was still a mistake.

Since then I've realized I should have based that portion of my identity on my love of learning, not the outcome of it, my status as a college student. I do love to learn! That's something that will never change, wether I'm a student, or a business woman, or a wife, or wherever I go.

How do you define you identity? To you focus it on what you do? Or the reasons behind what you do? Do you focus in on what you value, or you think others value?