What Is Identity?

My first reaction to this question is that “ Identity” as it is used actually is just a highfalutin’ way of saying “personality”. It is an attempt to “objectively ground” subjectivity in a consensus of categories — but to what end? What do I gain by thinking of myself as a member of a Club (A race, sex, class, gender, etc. ad nauseum) by virtue of some arbitrarily selected characteristics that I seem to have? Does “Identity” make me freer, stronger, or more resilient? Or rather, does it tie me to a cluster of pre-determined meanings that deny choice and emergence in exchange for the appearance of certainty — of a place I can claim as “True” because it corresponds with stereotypes of what someone “like me” should be in the eyes of others?

This chain of questions had been brewing for a while when I wrote the following two musings to my friend, Harif. I think they both touch on the fundamental process of becoming rather than submitting to some destiny of “Identity”, although they begin from very different places.

1.

The person I am today is a creative response to the qualities I was born with, what I was born into, what was done to me, how I chose to react to those things in the past, where I find myself today, what I do, whom I love, what I believe in, my strengths and weaknesses in the present and my aspirations. I am not reducible to any one of those things nor can I erase any of them from the fabric of what I am, even though I might want to.

Other people are the same. They are the creative solutions to all of those conditions in their own lives.

I am lucky because to fulfill what drives me I have had to work hard to weave the pain, despair, loneliness, desperation, etc. that my childhood and the cruel acts of others forced upon me into who I am now. In the process I am discovering the joy, courage, compassion, love and pure stubbornness that I had buried along with the pain so that I could be safe in my self-made prison. I have a long way to go and I will not get there before I die because there is so much to learn, understand and share.

I can't take credit for what drives me. I don't understand where it comes from, but there it is anyway. When I am at my best, it is my great joy to try and fulfill it with gratitude. When I am at my worst, I loose sight of what is around me and get lost in echoes from the past which I can do nothing about and I feel abandoned and deprived of what "could have been".

That's Life. It can't be edited, rewound or started over. We have no choice but to live it or refuse to live. After 50 years of existing, I choose to live it as fully as I can now: shit, anger, fear, pain, panic included because that's part of it.

2.

I think there may be a different level to forgiveness, and trust too, my friend. Let me know what you think of this.

The truth is that no matter what they do our abusers can never make up for what they did, fix us, or make it right, etc. What they did took something from us that we can never get back.

As we grow older and the fantasies of boyhood fade -- that we can be saved, get justice, devastate them with some brave act so they actually see what they did, unlock their twisted heads and minds and save them, etc. -- we are forced to accept that we were "left holding the bag".

This presents us with a difficult choice. Do we focus on what we are owed— counting up the injuries and the debt every day, saying "Ah ha!" when we come across something new we can't do or feel or be and then lay that as well at their feet, making their debt and our righteous need for (impossible) recompense that much greater? Do we spend years mapping our scars while our loved ones wonder where we are, obsessed with what we can never be but still dreaming of being paid back in full, or imagining what we would have been had we been spared?

Or, do we accept that we must always live with the wounds and the nasty gifts they gave us making the best of ourselves -- knowing that we have no other choice but to move forward and take our destiny in our own hands in order to make a free life for ourselves? We cancel the debt as unpayable so that their choice to recognize what they can never pay back and "make amends", or not, no longer has any influence on our path forward. This “Forgiveness” places us firmly in our own hands, and in the full presence of those who love us or may do so. The price is the acceptance that we can never get back what was taken. They couldn’t return it even if they wanted to.

If we choose the former we are always seeing ourselves as wanting, broken and needing to be fixed. We cannot trust others because we cannot trust ourselves to deal with possible betrayal or injury. We cannot bear to have anything else taken from us, and so we close the doors.

If we choose the latter we have to get on with the business of healing our wounds the best we can, understanding their extent, and working within the constraints they impose on us to be who we want to be, all without a map. After a while, perhaps, we forget our wounds are there, sometimes at least. During this process we face challenges, we fail, we succeed, we get stronger. We find that trust comes more easily because we learn that we can overcome pain and live fully even when we are hurt. It is slow but it is happening.

I'm not sure that this is the forgiveness you mean, my friend, but it is something important I think.

Unfortunately, my conversations with Harif were cut short by death. I wish I could tell him now what I have learned since, and hear his own gentle explorations.

Both of these musings focus on process rather than on origin or destination. The cost of focusing on becoming is that we give up on the safety of knowing where we are supposed to be going or how are we are supposed to get there. (I now think we pretty much give up on any safety at all other than that which we are blessed with by chance and circumstance in this moment.) The benefit is that we discover ourselves at the helm of our lives even in the midst of Sirens, storms, rocks and mirages. Thus we have no choice but to learn and become stronger. Each day we have the opportunity to become better Men.

However, there is something important missing here. If we hate the vessel in which we are traveling we can never get anywhere. We can only hope for the journey to end. If we believe that we are despoiled, we cannot possibly trust ourselves to captain our own lives. If we do not believe we can heal we must always seek safety, for any injury might be fatal.

What Harif and I shared, and what many of the “Touched”, as he called those who were sexually abused as children, share was a profound and nuanced memory of evil and the certainty that no matter what we chose, we were not immune to it. As Captains we were not merely wary of the rocks, but feared that we might willingly, even if unknowingly, direct ourselves and all those we care about onto them. We felt in our dreams we were the Sirens, and we feared that our dreams were real. Therefore the struggle against the Evil we had experienced became a struggle against ourselves, too. Even if we accepted that we were innocent in all the ways that mattered most, we still knew we had been indelibly marked and that we could not perhaps even see it.

This may be difficult for the “Untouched” to understand. I can’t know. It seems to me, however, that I live in a world composed of people who do not understand the cost of freedom. The freedom to chose is an unforgiving gift. You cannot exercise it until you understand its magnitude, and when you understand you know that many other people just like you, and better, have fallen. Some because they were weak. Some because they were unlucky. Some because they could only repeat what they had been told without ever understanding the why.

We, the “Touched”, know that we have failed terribly, if for no other reason than that as boys we could not navigate men’s waters nor resist the Sirens. They were Fathers, Mothers, Brothers and Sisters. They were Love. They were what we tried so hard not to need, and yet did anyway. The map they gave us was marked by lies and imaginings designed to make them powerful and us weak. The best thing we could do was destroy it and strike out on our own. Some of us chose to stay with them, and rather than continue to resist what we could not, we gave ourselves up to the love of Monsters. We relished in it and let it fill us with what we were not ready to feel. Afterwards, sleeping beside them, or cast out to fend for ourselves, we remembered their faces not seeing us and dropping all pretense once they had us — once they were inside. In either case we were left divided against ourselves. If we were to live as Men, we had to make ourselves anew.

I imagine that you can now see how “Identity” just can’t cut it for us, for me. For us there can be nothing other than emergence because the poles of our lives and of our hearts cannot be connected except in living now. The past can never be solved, nor the deep lessons of anguish and self-doubt unlearned. They can only be incorporated into a present in which we insist on choosing for ourselves. Each day their balance changes and we must change, too. This seems somehow right to me, as if this way of living opens a door onto a deeper truth that the “Untouched” do not walk through so readily. I believe that at our best the “Touched” embody what Human Beings always were — precarious, conflicted and temporary — surviving against all odds. Telling children the world is safe and actually believing it is folly. It is not. It never was. It is our birthright to face danger with open eyes. We must face that, inside and out, or give up.

Looking back I suspect that the only way that Harif and I could open the door to uncertainty and the possibility of freedom was through Faith, although neither of us believed in God, or at least not any kind of God that anyone would recognize as such. And yet for each of us at the moment of Choice we needed something to guide us towards Life. Harif killed one innocent boy to save another. Later, he risked, and eventually lost, everything so that that boy, Jonas, could be free. It was love that moved him and fierce determination. He had to do it. I don’t believe he ever fully knew why, although I suspect I do.

I have had many more decades than Harif, and many more moments to Choose. All that I can really say with certainty about the whys, hows and for-whats of those moments is that the choices I made out of fear inevitably led to disaster no matter how well thought out, reasonable and even “compassionate” they were. Although this is very hard for me to accept, I cannot chose well while looking inward. My best choices have always been those that have embraced uncertainty and focused on the unknowable world around me and those I share it with.