Identity

“The pictures looked alive enough to speak. In each one, there was nothing except the head and shoulders of the subject against a gray background. None of them had that blank, wanted-poster look that snapshots could have produced. These pictures had a lot to say even to non-Oankali observers about who their subjects were—or who the Oankali thought they were.”

--from Dawn by Octavia Butler

I find the concept of identity fascinating. What is it that makes us who we are? Is my identity something that I choose, or am I just born with it? My thoughts on this have wavered over the years.

When I was in graduate school, I co-wrote a paper about how the experience of studying abroad changes identity. Somehow, using one researcher’s definition of identity, my group and I operationalized the concept. We coded student responses on evaluation forms according to how the students claimed their identities had changed as a result of the study abroad experience.

I can’t remember the exact result of our little study, but I do know that we made some claim about how study abroad changed the way students defined themselves. The conclusion made sense to me at the time. My study abroad experience certainly changed the way I thought of myself. Before I left, I was a homebody. When I got back, I was a world traveler.

It wasn’t the only experience that changed my definition of myself, though. In a sense, I think of my identity as a fluid list of titles. I store that list someplace in my head, and it changes all the time. Today, I think the list would go something like this: Katie. Chicagoan. Runner. Math educator. Potterhead. Reader. Editor. Musical theater aficionado. Cat owner. Shark chef. Gleek. Wannabe singer.

Next week or next year, the list would probably be different. What’s even more interesting to me is that if I asked someone else to write such a list for me, they would probably say different things. Yet this ever-changing list of titles is how I tend to define myself.

Maybe the changeability of these titles is the basis of their appeal. I know that I find it a little scary to think that there are things about my identity that I can’t change. Still, such things exist. I can remember several moments in my life when I came to accept certain things about myself that are unchangeable.

When I was in Sweden, I went to the first of a series of co-ed soccer games. I failed miserably at it—and that was when I knew that I would never be a team-sport athlete. During one particularly stressful moment at work within the last few years, I realized I was trying to rearrange my tasks and responsibilities in a way that would optimize my time—and that was when I knew that, at my core, I was a mathematician. After the umpteenth time I was asked to teach or do a volunteer project with kids, and I still felt the same sense of anxiety and dread—that was when I knew I was just never going to be as comfortable with kids in large groups as I wish I was.

There are a great number of aspects of my identity that I can and do change, but also a smaller number of things that I can’t. So which ones matter? Which ones are my true identity? Do I get to decide who I am, or is my list of titles just a blanket I use to cover up the deepest parts of my nature?

I know, I know. The answer is that they both matter. I know. Yet it was not easy for me to convince myself of that. I still go back and forth sometimes. One side of the argument says that I should pay attention to my deep-down natures, and not randomly decide to try to be a soccer player when I know I cannot be one. The other side of the argument says that to claim that I simply am what I am is cowardly. Just stating that I’ll never be good with kids is a cop-out for avoiding situations that make me uncomfortable. Which is the right thing? Do I strive to choose my own identity and make it the truth? Or to I try to identify the unchangeables and accept them?

For the answer, I turned to the ever-reliable source of pop culture. It just so happens that there is something I love on either side of the argument.

The spirit of Glee would say that I should accept and embrace the things I cannot change. (“I was born this way, hey!”) Yet one of the most famous lines in the Harry Potter series says, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

I am who I was born to be, and I am also who I choose to be. For years, the two have felt contradictory. But perhaps they are not. I’ll let you know when I figure it out.