Peaceful Wolverine There’s a phenomenon common to human beings, or at least common to their expressed reflections, which is the attribution of origin to concepts, which must then be mapped onto behaviour. It is quite obvious that any meaning we might have, and I think there is meaning here, nevertheless cannot flow, directionally, from abstract to concrete. Yet the manner of speech remains embedded even in everyday discourse.
I am not accusing anyone of deliberately fabricating their convictions. These concepts feel sincere. This essay is about the claiming, the invention, and ultimately the false certainty that comes out of the process — and about one feeling that runs through every version of it: the convincing, impossible sense that something outside of us, bigger than us, has a plan that our whims, impulses, and urges serendipitously align with.
We seem driven to find an “identity” that can define us. We are so insecure, so socially motivated, that we don’t even try to stand alone. We resemble lost children — eyebrows raised and pinched, lips trembling, tears on the edge of spilling over eyelids, looking back and forth, back and forth… Desperate to know our own identities, which are apparently a deeply kept secret we ourselves don’t have access to. Certainly, that is how I felt for much of my life: desperate.
We are insecure because we are social creatures. I say that and you probably think I mean that we like to be with each other. I don’t mean that. My claim is that part of our architecture is co-creation. We are, in most ways, who we are with, and who we have spent the most time with. Isn’t it remarkable how frequently our beliefs, which feel self-originated, have everything in common with the beliefs of our communities?
Insecurity is unsolvable. Like uncertainty, we must come to terms with its constant presence in our lives.
Naturally, we try to solve insecurity anyway by constructing secure identities, despite the philosophical impossibility of that concept. We are biological evolutions — imagine the absurdity of a squirrel insisting that it has an identity above and beyond that of being a squirrel. Is it an individual? Of course. Is it part of an overarching archetypal pattern drawn from an underlying significance? Seems unlikely, in the Occam’s Razor sense.
Identity as a concept carries with it the implication of inevitability. It can change in a moment, and yet it is also fixed. Identity is inherited from one’s ethnicity and culture, and sometimes from sexual orientation, yet it is also self-authored. This is done by telling someone else about it in a form of declaration, or standing up in a group and making an announcement, or via a post on social media. Identity is shared, but also deeply personal and individual. It is absolutely vital to one’s well-being to have this concept defined and ready for explanation, and to defend one’s identity against disagreement. A disagreement with your definition is an attack on you, every bit as serious as being shot at or stabbed. Luckily, at the same time and without contradiction, you also don’t have to do anything for an identity — it’s just what you are, you see.
This word cloud of contradictory, melting, moving positions on identity must be heard without scepticism. As I’ve noted, to question someone’s explanation of their identity is an ATTACK, and history demonstrates that these attacks are taken so seriously that they inspire generations of warfare, hostility, and generalized aggression.
For example, let’s say a local charismatic figure begins telling their friends and family that they have received a revelation directly from a divine figure who, from first principles, has authority over literally everything. This divine being is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, and it has decided, in a very real and legally binding sense, that our local charismatic figure here on our specific planet will be its mouthpiece. It cannot speak for itself, you see, and so it must select a proxy.
The friends and neighbours of this new prophet are convinced. No, that isn’t the right word: They know that the prophet speaks the truth. Shortly after hearing the story, you also know. You’re so sure that you change everything about your life, because you’ve just realized your entire life to this point was actually spent in a state of waiting, and now the time has arrived — your identity has found you. You can be what you were, ahem, always MEANT to be.
At this point, we hit that first awkward hiccup, because these discoveries of identity always come with a few indispensable caveats: First, it isn’t only true for you — whatever you’ve “discovered” about identity, it applies to everyone; Second, you have to tell people about your identity, and they have to agree with you; Third, if they do not also accept this new truth and change in accordance with it, you are the one being attacked.
We can leave the specific prophet behind, now, because this urge has nothing to do with religion as a siloed concept. It doesn’t matter if your prophet preaches on gender, or exercise, or diet, or political affiliation, or some arbitrary honour code. It could be ethnicity, sexual orientation, tribe, whatever.
Historical examples are abundant. An identity is conceived of, shared, and embraced. The new believers spread the word, sometimes with actual proselytizing, more often through normal interactions. They run up against other identities who are either offended or indifferent. And now, they are on the defensive. They tried to share their new, eternal truth, and this one person or group — family, or romantic interests, or strangers on the street — didn’t agree.
Conclusion? Society is oppressing you.
As a species, we are reliable in this effect. From one negative encounter, we make sweeping generalizations about the encompassing state of affairs, even if that encounter’s negativity was merely polite confusion.
A ten-year-old, for example, tells his mummy he’s just realized he’s meant to be an actor. His mummy, who is in the middle of something, responds with confusion and an umpteenth request to be allowed to continue her task.
That’s all it takes. Later on in life, this person will explain how influential it was on his identity that his first attempt at expressing himself was “rejected by society.”
I am not dismissing, minimizing, or denying the blatant bigotry that is nearly always a feature of our tribes. I am saying that in terms of inspiring resistance, a movement of some kind, no one needs open hostility. They do not need a stereotypical bully, like Biff from Back to the Future, to give them wedgies, laugh at them in public, and call them names. Those things are great to have, but they aren’t necessary: you can make do with just being ignored or misunderstood.
Looping back to my opening paragraph’s claim about backwards thinking: Picture a tree. It takes root at the edge of a forest. As it grows, it is buffeted by strong winds; a minor forest fire leaves black scars; it nearly dies to the nibbles of some adorable herbivore, which leaves it disfigured; it doesn’t get enough rain at a certain crucial developmental stage.
Nevertheless, it gets enough of what it physically needs that it does grow. It gets as big as it can.
Is this a story of oppression and resistance? Was this tree targeted? Did it overcome its circumstances, thrive in spite of the hostility of “the world?” Or is that a story told after the fact?
In its specifics, this tree’s story is a series of facts. This happened, then this happened, then this happened, and so on. When we map our concepts onto that story, we remove from those specifics. We enter the territory of meaning. Destiny. Fantasy. Legend. Myth.
Fairy tales.
The funny thing, I think, is that this always starts from an individual story, the purpose of which was to distinguish that individual. Inevitably, the individual particulars are genericized and given external motivations. Astrology is a good example.
“I’m like this, and I was born at a certain time of year,” becomes “I am like this because I was born at a certain time of year, and here’s why everyone else born at that certain time of year is just like me.”
“I was dating a girl who was younger than me, and then we broke up and now I’m with a girl who is older than me,” becomes “I’m drawn to mature women because of the archetypal dynamics of my relationship with my mother.”
The story of a 15-year-old boy named Peter who realized in 1985 that he wasn’t attracted to girls, but to boys, and got a negative reaction when he told his parents, becomes a generic parable about “being gay in the ’80s.”
Nobody does this on purpose. We narrate because we are social animals, and a story is the only form a life can be handed to another person in. The tree doesn’t need one. But to effectively communicate with each other, we do. The error isn’t the story. The error is believing the story was there first — that the thing you are now was waiting for you, with your name on it, before you did any of the things that made it. That’s the feeling every example in this essay has in common: that the author of your life is somewhere outside you. A god. The stars. The time of year. Society. Something bigger than you, with a plan.
It feels right. I know it does. But “it feels right” is evidence that it feels right, and that is all it is evidence for — it’s a fact about you, not a fact about the world. That distinction is the whole labour of cognitive behavioural therapy, which is a slow apprenticeship in noticing that a thought — and I mean the word to cover feeling, impulse, memory, sensation, the lot — is a thing that happened in your head, and does not, on that account, have an associated truth value. The feeling of deep significance is just that — a feeling of deep significance. Going further, making it part of a narrative, generalizing it, drawing conclusions about its meaning and consequence, this is the work of your imagination.
In conclusion, when you are summarizing yourself, internally or externally, remember that you came first. You can and arguably must communicate with concepts — “I’m a middle-aged atheist Canadian cis man” — but that is backwards from me. Those are genericized labels contingent on time and place for understanding, used for summary and convenience, not as a prescription or diagnosis or prediction. If something about me changes, the labels must follow. I can’t pick them first and then make myself match. Naming my child Caesar does not make them an emperor.
You don’t need an identity. You just have one, regardless of whether it is ever told as a story in a language. And if you do choose to tell that story, you don’t have to tell it conceptually. You will, and so will I, but the concepts are afterthoughts. They are interpretations. They are not you.