“Tell me about yourself”
That, right there, is my least favorite question. I cringe when I hear it. What do they want to know? Where do I start? Do they want to know who I am in this very moment or who I was yesterday? Who I pretend to be when I don’t know people well or who I am in my closest circle of friends? Do they just want a list of my ‘accomplishments’? Or should I make them really uncomfortable and tell them about all my ‘messy’ bits?
Any way I swing it, this question always trips me up. I may be alone in this but I highly doubt it. Identities; who we believe we are, can be tricky things. Are we really the roles we play? The words we call ourselves? What are identities and how do we dance with them gently in this life? This is a question I am clearly still trying to figure out.
I have the ability to shape shift and always have. I can become exactly what I believe someone wants me to be. I am a master at curating how others perceive me, and yes, it is as manipulative as it sounds. I’ve always done this in an attempt to fit in, but it has led to me having no fucking clue who I really am.
When my rewilding journey began, it felt like the cruelest form of torture to start opening up and taking off all the boxes I had put myself in. Each box was an identity that often no longer served me, yet underneath, I felt like a naked mole rat; exposed, cold and vulnerable. My real skin was paper thin after hiding under all these boxes for so long. It felt like I had no option but to hide behind new identities at times, yet I knew that was not the answer.
The thing I’m learning is that we are not our identities. There is nothing that makes us good or bad. There is nothing that we need to call ourselves to make us worthy. If you are here, you are worthy. PERIOD. But what happens when we cannot separate who we are with the roles we become? Even thinking about who I am beneath all the boxes I put myself in feels too uncomfortable.
In yogic philosophy it is believed that the root cause of suffering is the ignorance of the true self. We confuse our identities and roles for who we are. And let’s be honest, we rarely meet our true self. We say, I am a physical therapist rather than my profession is a physical therapist. Our society encourages this practice deeply. We are taught that our value is often built by what we do, how much we accomplish and how much we can provide for others. This creates a blurring of the lines between who we are and who the world believes we should be.
I have fallen into this “should be” trap my whole life. My value came solely from what I can provide to the world. This was a foundational belief for me. I cannot even begin to express the friction and discomfort this eventually brought to my life. It took a long time for me to begin to understand where the discomfort was coming from.
But there always comes a point in your life when you lose an identity. Yesterday was my last day working as a clinical physical therapist for the foreseeable future. It feels like death when we lose a way of identifying ourselves. I am incredibly grateful that I have been deconstructing my attachment to identities very intentionally over the past two years. I thought I would wake up overwhelmed with a sense of purposelessness. But thank fucking god, I did not. It made me realize I have slowly unraveled my sense of purpose from my job. It was not quick and painless, but it was absolutely worth it to wake up this morning with a sense of ease.
As humans, we confuse impermanence and permanence often. This is where the oh so fun identity crisis comes into play. Our identities are always impermanent. When we inevitably lose an identity, as I did yesterday, it can be destabilizing. Holding loosely to all of our identities can make transitions much less jarring.
We are never taught a framework for holding identities lightly. We walk through this world thinking we are a set of things when really we are simply souls having a human experience. Part of the experience is to create identities. Another part is to let those identities die when they no longer serve us. Studying the concept of impermanence has helped me immeasurably.
The idea I’m still grappling with is that identities are not good or bad. Identities and roles provide beautiful spaces for community. As humans we crave connection, it is in our DNA. Without any identities, connection would be near impossible. Yet, holding too tightly to those identities and believing they are what give us value causes distress. My yoga teacher always says that our identities are like hats we can wear. It’s doubtful you want to wear one hat for the rest of your life. The lesson comes from being able to take our hats off and put them back on with ease.
As I transition to a new phase of life where my physical therapist hat is getting hung up for a bit, I am working on finding what hats feel right. I honestly have no idea at this very moment but am settled in the knowing that all my identities, new and old, are simply beautiful hats. They do not change who I am, just how I look temporarily.
What identities do you carry that might need a bit of rewilding?