You; a Deeper Look at Identity
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
Associating your identity with things of permanence seems dull, disconnected, and damn near impossible. There is more meaning to that which is temporary.
“The more a thing tends to be permanent, the more it tends to be lifeless.”
—Alan Watts
I often remind myself that all things are temporary, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still lose my shit when it proves true with something before I expect it to.
When circumstances, places, people, and other temporary elements that we’ve attached our identity to change only minorly, we might not know exactly why we feel lost. If the change is vast, we notice but might not know how to move forward or construct a solution.
People who lose good health, their spouse, a limb… are all faced with identity changes and an inability to do (or irrelevance in now doing) what they used to do, especially in the same way they used to. I.e. run marathons, make coffee for their wife each morning or call their [now deceased] mother every Sunday afternoon, braid their daughter’s hair before school, etc.
Say someone who identifies as a woman and a mother has been a stay-at-home parent for the last two decades. Now she suddenly finds her nest empty. If her identity was strongly associated with this temporary but albeit lengthy and significant state, there is a good chance she will struggle to find meaning and purpose in her life moving forward and see the potential in this new chapter for the opportunity that it is. We’ve all likely heard this story or know one of these moms.
I believe that when we feel disconnected from our identity there are a few primary scenarios we’ll find ourselves in. The most hopeful being that we recognize that we need to establish new standards, build new habits and create new rituals, so we get to work on what and how. This requires clarity and support.
Tony Robbins states that rituals are what make our standards real; they’re the backbone so to speak, they define us.
Another scenario… we mope. We tell ourselves that all is hopeless and the person we were is gone along with whatever else has left.
Cue the born again Christian transformation.
Last, we stay stagnant; we exhaust ourselves in treading water because we have no fucking clue what to do or maybe even what exactly is ailing us. This last one is particularly relevant when there are so many moving parts, it’s hard to sift through the dirt to unearth what’s buried (this can even be the case for your therapist).
Since we don’t know how to move forward, we play it safe and stay where we are.
I happen to be a master metaphoric water treader—keeping a smile on my face until I’m completely submerged and out of site with the sunken ship.
Detachment as a skill.
I loathe letting go. I can hold onto just about anything but a straight face for an extended period of time. I’ve become so dang good at holding onto shit that occasionally I won’t know how to let go or even have the wherewithal to know that I should.
A little over a year ago, my partner (being fully aware of my dysfunctionality) text me a Tony Robbins speech on youtube.
Oh, nice! He’s got some good shit… I thought to myself.
Then I played the first 24 seconds.
Fuck.
“...if you say ‘I’m really gonna work hard to stop smokin’ but ya know… I’ve been a smoker my whole life and I am a smoker’ then I know your days are numbered, you’re going to be back smokin’ cigarettes again because we all act consistently with who we believe we are.”
Fuckkk.
Until that moment I hadn’t realized that I had never thought to disassociate myself as a smoker. I had tried everything to quit, and to the untrained eye, I had actually been quite successful a few times; stints of quitting for five or six months at a time, once without so much as a puff or a patch. Those were some of the most miserably deprived months of my life (which is the problem in itself), until one of the last times I quit.
I’ll never forget when I was in college and a family member came to my apartment with a pack of my brand, handed them to me, and said: “for all our sakes.”
The only difference between the considerably less miserable time and the prior attempts was that I convinced myself that smoking didn’t have to be a part of who I was. It didn’t have to control my life. This was not easy and took months and months of being willingly manipulated by some English fellow via audiobook.
The bottom line is that I let go of the idea that I was a smoker.
Unfortunately, I didn’t let go of the idea that smoking had been a remedy of comfort and reassurance for me for over two decades, so there’s some thought work to be done there to completely detach myself from the yearning I still occasionally have.
Multiple eggs, multiple baskets.
Viewing the identity piece more as an expansion and enrichment than a major overhaul altogether has been helpful for me throughout the process.
I suppose this also protects me from the risk of becoming one of those born again Christians, as if I’d ever be at risk of that.
This includes ideating who I want to be more like and asking questions like “what sort of standards do they have for themselves?”, “what are their habits and rituals?” and “how do they define success?”
When I had viewed who I was in an all-or-nothing mindset it was obviously non malleable, which was incredibly unhelpful (like I’ve found most things through that lens to be).