On Identity

Some of the behaviors that have developed amid humans simply confound the mind. Some are so peculiar, we tend to ask ourselves how on Earth they could even have arisen.

Whether it’s caused by cultural metamorphosis, evolutionary machining, or a clumsy mixture of the two, at some point in their lives, everyone asks the question who am I? The search for identity pursues us; in all of our daily goings-on, the question who am I? persists in our minds, and of course, we try to answer it. Because we are so plagued by this thought, it becomes nearly inconceivable to disregard it, and we carve out an integral part of our lives dedicated solely to this mechanical search for self. Although this vague concept of awareness and self begins to first doff its mask of incoherence at quite an early age, the process of organizing articulate interpretations of our own identities essentially starts with school.

On the first day of kindergarten I was asked to tell the class my name, my favorite animal, my favorite color, and my pets’ names (if I had any). I happily did so, though without realizing the grandiose implications of my actions. By disclosing those four facts about myself, I crudely shaped the first tower of my sand-castle identity. From that moment on, I was Rich, whose favorite animal was the shark, whose favorite color was blue, whose fish were three and unnamed. These four fragments of information, menial as they may have seemed initially, provided the first step in pointing me towards a future destination, giving me a direction in which I unfortunately I stayed pointed without question for a number of years later.

It took me eight years to realize blue did not necessarily have to be my favorite color, and in fact I really didn’t care for it much at all. After five more years, I realized one really needn’t even have a favorite color at all. Whenever we state a fact, a value, a belief, a principle, or anything about ourselves, whether we’ve selected it through random choice, social pressure, or even a complex series of logical deductions, we construct a tremendous bias towards that statement, and tend to do whatever is in our power to defend it and to keep it from changing. We assume our own selection from all possible options to be inherently superior and all others to be inferior. This is precisely why it is so hard to change favorite colors, or more practically, societal ideologies.

Memorizing those four facts for fourteen other students, of course, was more than enough to occupy a class full of kindergartners for the rest of the day. By the end of the week though, we could all walk along the beach and easily pick out everyone's sand-castle towers, each unique in height, width, and uneven parapets. The foundation for the rest of our lives had been set, and the trend did not cease to continue.

On my first day of high school, I was assigned to write an essay in my freshman English class that instructed me to introduce myself and to write on anything I thought was important about my character. To supply us with a nucleation site for our thoughts, our teacher encouraged us to write about sports, interests, hobbies, or personality traits. In other words, in our paper we were to illuminate any of our significant characteristics. Not only were we continuing to build new towers of sand, but we were etching more detail into the old ones. As we mature, we begin to more solidly define ourselves in many ways, one of the most fundamental being through the use of language. This makes sense, because language is the most practical way within society by which to communicate our definitions of self, and such explains why its teaching is emphasized so forcefully in high school. The lamentable aspect of this practice, however, lies in the permanence of what is writ in ink. Writing developed as a record-keeping tool, as a method to concretely engrave words, sentences, thoughts, and descriptions such that they would last for a relatively long period of time. Thus, when we write about ourselves in high school (or at any point during life), we add a kind of permanence to our descriptions of self; the words that we use to depict our individual nature again lock us onto a specific path, and as we define ourselves further and more deeply, it becomes increasingly difficult to veer from that path when opportunity for change arises. The words we use to distinguish ourselves become ingrained in our subconscious, and they become a distinctive part of who we are. With a wrench in the gears of self-change, rather than seek out new tenets of identity, we instead subtly attempt to conform to our already transcribed definitions.

Countless other “identity” essays followed after that first as I progressed through high school. In no way could I escape the emphasis on the development of my ability to be able to tell the world who I was, and to do so in clear, unambiguous terms. Crudely shaped sand towers were no longer acceptable methods of building an identity. With each essay or story or short paragraph that I wrote, I imprinted finer and finer detail into the walls of my sand-castle edifices, and I shaped them more and more carefully so that their architecture might end up as aesthetically pleasing as possible. The rigidness and static nature of my identity was beginning to show itself. It was detailed but incredibly resistant to change. I even began to mold a new type of structure into my growing sand palace, composed of words, definitions, labels, phrases, and anecdotes. As the essays and conversations about myself became more numerous, I found that I tended to repeat certain descriptions quite frequently, whereas others dissolved away. This is what led to the construction of a moat around my sand-castle; my identity's first line of defense had been built. No longer could the incoming tides reach the towers within the center of the castle as easily, for they would simply spill into the moat and their mighty power dissipate before they could brush up against the tower walls. After we define a terminology with which to describe ourselves, we deepen our moat, and the various outside forces that once influenced so strongly each and every one of our actions begin to reach our inner castle more and more infrequently. We become impervious, resistant, and the dynamic nature so key to human experience starts to disappear. Our sand-castles become rock solid in the hot sunlight, and no longer can they even subtly feel each others’ presences. They might as well be made of stone, unyielding, unresponsive, and to the casual observer, unconscious.

The beauty of sand-castles lies most primarily in their short-lived existence. Children will spend endless hours building the most well-planned-out and intricate sand-castle, knowing all the while that it won’t even last past high tide; the next day, they simply and happily start anew, filled with new ideas of how to make it better, or at least different. The beauty of any edifice, whether physical like a mound of sand, or psychological like a our own identity, comes not from any snapshot of the construction itself, but from an analysis of how it has changed over time and from an appreciation of all of the possible variations in its design. Whenever we examine our concepts of self, we ought to view our towers and buildings not from within the walls of the castle itself, but from the perspective of a passerby on the shore. We ought to envision how changing certain aspects of ourselves might in fact lead to a more sound or at least a more aesthetic make-up of our identity.

Before wrapping up, I think it seems relatively important to also touch on the concept of I at least briefly. After all, an understanding of what the pronoun I describes is a crucial part of being able to understand the question who am I? I is one of those words that has arisen in every language, simply out of practicality (I imagine it would be a trifle difficult for a society to function were there no way to reference the first person singular), and it has unfortunately come to take on connotations derived solely from its practicality. In the most straightforward sense, it refers to whoever the speaker; this is a necessary practice in order for a society to communicate about the relationships among its members. In its practical use, however, I needs only to designate the speaker in the brief period of time surrounding the current moment of speaking. What matters is where I am now and what I am doing this week, or this month, not where I will be in fifty years or what I will be doing when I am eighty, at least in immediate and pragmatic conversation. However, in the more philosophical sense of I, the one we most often attempt to procure when answering the question who am I?, I must refer to one’s entire self, not just oneself during the present week, or during the present moment. Most people have somewhat of an understanding of this, and thus when answering who am I? talk about their existence in the present, as well as the events in the past that have led up to how they perceive themselves now. However, this still represents only a portion of the description of I, for a significant piece of everyone’s life lies in the future. This piece of life, of course, is impossible to describe, as the future is unpredictable at best. Therefore, by simple logic, whenever someone attempts to answer who am I?, the most he or she can do is to begin with the qualifier so far... This person, though not fully answering the question, will at least not try to pretend to have responded completely.

To completely respond to the question who am I? is impossible. Still though, we try in vain. We attempt over and over again to describe ourselves more accurately and definitively, to fortify our interior identity so strongly that the ocean tides can no longer reach it. But in fact, if we open up our walls, and fill in our moats with sand, and let the tides pour in over our towers, we may discover new forms, and new sandy architectures that are even more aesthetic than we had ever imagined. Instead of building up our identities linearly, only adding more to what was previously there, we ought to experience the variations of our thoughts, our ideals, our beliefs. If our towers start to crumble we ought to let them fall. Only then can we see how to more beautifully reconstruct them.