Identity

A strange conglomeration of reading this summer, but some thread of identity flows through it. A little bit of Cultural Revolution (The Vagrants) and Mexican Revolution (The Underdogs), a little bit of gender exploration (Middlesex) and coming of age(Boy's Life, The Dust of 100 Dogs). A bit of career and personal insecurity (Crossing to Safety, The Man with the Compound Eyes, Station Eleven, All the Light we Cannot See). Perhaps what I am thinking about is less about "Who am I" and more about the effect of external stimuli affecting identity. This external stimuli could be environmental/situational or it could be communal, and we have varying degrees of control over these factors. After a pandemic flu, you have no control over your situation and you are basically in react mode. But how you react and who you choose to be even in survival (especially in survival?) is when true identity is revealed. When put into the stressful situation, when the intellectual action filters are not working, who will you be? Very rarely in literature do we see this part of life. The pre-stress life where identity is forged. How a character chooses to act and think as an individual in the privacy of their mind, how they choose to act and interact in community when surrounded by "like-minded". These are the essential practice grounds for identity. These thoughts, interactions, actions, while seemingly innocuous in the daily grind, become our foundation for action under stress, in the dystopian future, so to speak. It is this daily grind if identity formation that is rarely explicit in our story telling. After all, it is boring. But somehow, the combination of books I read this summer started to give me a glimpse.

For myself, the clearest example of this boring identity formation is my life decision to be pacifist. Will I ever truly be in a position in my life where I have to test this decision? I sincerly hope not. So how do I know I am pacifist? It is easy to claim if you never encounter violence. So I need to form my identity in the small arena. To make daily choices in personal interactions that move away from violence. This must include verbal violence in conversation (which is often more subtle than I am even aware). This includes violence of invisibility, for example, with homelessness and poverty and all the unpopular. If I choose to see each person I encounter as truly and fully human, my hope is that even in a stressful, dystopian future event I will be unable to view anyone as anything less than fully human. That I will be unable to participate in violence. I suppose that is how you know it is identity.