5 What Is My Identity?
Ruth had been hearing a lot of folks talk about their identity as if it was an important and fixed thing. Yet Ruth wasn’t so sure. Ruth didn’t really know her own identity, and she didn’t think she could see a particularly clear identity in any of her friends. Ruth’s friends all had personalities, but they all seemed to have multiple identities that they put on and took off at will, or in some instances willy-nilly. Ruth wanted to ignore the whole subject of identities, but she didn’t think that was quite the right approach, either.
Identity
To mature and grow psychologically and spiritually, you should not only understand what it means to have a genuine or authentic self and to grow in transcendent consciousness, but also what it means to have identities through which you express yourself. We use the word identity widely in our current lexicon, even if we’re not sure exactly what the concept means. Perhaps social media is to blame, like we blame it for everything else, as if it’s not us, the users of social media, who are responsible for its ill effects. Social media allows us to carefully curate an online presence that, we hear from insiders, doesn’t comport much at all with what the presenter’s life is actually like. Those projecting victimhood may instead have rich privileges. Those projecting privilege may in fact be paupers. And yet we claim these profiles as our identity, again, whatever that construct may mean. Developing a sound view of your identity, whether such a thing exists or not, may indeed help you get a grip on yourself.
Personas
A useful way to think of identity is as a persona that you learn early in life to unconsciously adopt, to help you affect and adapt to your situation. An identity is a bit like a mask worn in an old-fashioned theater production. Indeed, the word persona has its root in the Latin word for a theater mask or character. We put on personas to make our audiences cheer, cry, or laugh, in other words to manipulate their responses to us. Children adopt identities that help them navigate and control their environments and family relationships. They then extend those identities into school and beyond into life. Some of us project ourselves as helpers, others of us as rebels, and others as achievers, victims, or jokesters. These identities serve us well. The child projecting the persona of the quiet one begets love and comfort. The jokester deflects unwanted criticism or disarms undesired tension. The achiever earns desired praise. An identity is thus a tool, costume, or character adopted to survive and thrive within relationships and environments.
Constructed
We construct and manipulate our identities or personas more so than receiving them. Our personas are not our original, inherent, genuine self. You might disagree and instead find something inherent in you that you would call your persona or feel that something is innate about your identity. And surely, the demeanor that we develop and accompanying attitudes and behaviors that we commonly display had their origin early in our life. That’s the nature of human cognitive, social, and emotional development. We are incredibly attuned, adaptable, and capable entities when mature, and so mature human development takes an extraordinarily long time, two decades at least. But although we begin developing a persona quite early in life and continue its adaptation, that mask we present is indeed something that we present or put on rather than a reflection of our deepest self, even if we don’t project the mask deliberately. Children realize so when they move to a new neighborhood with new peers and norms. They must quickly adapt when they discover that the character they played in their old neighborhood no longer works so well. Children likewise learn to present a different persona when visiting the house of a friend, where the parents have different personalities, commitments, and expectations. We adopt personas as children and then modify or add to them in new situations as adults when necessary.
Multiple
We have more than one identity. By adulthood, we have learned to swap personas in and out, fitting to our environment, relationships, and circumstances. What the home and its occupants require won’t work at school or in the workplace. And so we shift from the compassionate caretaker to the obedient drone or from the congenial companion to the strict supervisor, whatever the home and then the school or workplace require. To be effective and influential, even valued and beloved, in one setting such as the home requires one persona, while to be the same way in another setting such as the workplace may require a very different persona. We thus manipulate our multiple personas according to the way in which our environment responds to us, so that we can meet our needs. The home needs one set of things from us and provides for us in one way, while the workplace needs another set of things from us and provides for us in another way. Notice how you swap personas in and out as you move from setting to setting.
Unconscious
Until we think clearly about our personas or identities, they remain largely unconscious to us. Developing an identity need not be a conscious act. Indeed, we do so much better intuitively. Our environment and relationships shape us. We are masters of adaptation. We truly become the company we keep. But we do so without thinking. Your spouse or someone else close to you may notice that when you return from an outing with your friends or another influential group, you have adopted one or another of their expressions, attitudes, or habits. And your spouse or other companion may let you know, subtly or otherwise, that you need to quickly put off that expression, attitude, or habit. You may not even have noticed it because you picked it up without thinking. But as soon as your spouse or companion calls it to your attention, you’ll notice it and may recognize where and from whom you picked it up. Personas, of course, are more elaborate and subtle than simply picking up an attitude, expression, or habit but are just as unconsciously acquired.
Filtering
Our personas affect everything we do. They are not simply common mannerisms or convenient demeanor. They are instead embodiments. We see with the persona’s eyes, hear with the persona’s ears, desire with the persona’s heart, and think with the persona’s thoughts. We filter our thoughts and actions through identities, asking our persona to give us permission to do as we believe the situation seems to require. In the worst case, we become slaves to our unconscious identity. A character you didn’t even consciously develop engulfs and entraps you. You end up living not your life but instead your persona’s life, ignoring deeper and truer desires and callings. You forgo your full development, instead letting your capacities dwindle until you find yourself living a caricature of yourself, as if playacting your own limited and peculiar role. Perhaps you’ve felt that dissatisfaction, as if you’re no longer deeply connected with yourself but instead acting through a persona in a cast role that both you and others expect of you.
Inauthentic
Importantly, personas are inauthentic. Your identity, the one that you are currently living out, is not the genuine, deep-seated, original you. Your persona is, in effect, an accidental identity, one that you acquired without thought while responding adaptively to the demands and stimuli of your environment. Move you to a new environment, where the people, rules, and resources all differ, and you’ll find yourself acquiring a new persona fitting to your new circumstance. Neither your old persona nor your new identity are you. You know instead, if you think deeply and clearly about it, that you have simply taken on different roles, developing and adapting your persona or mask to fulfill them. Yet the genuine you doesn’t playact. The genuine you, to the extent that you care about it and seek to nurture it, is not the persona that you project into the world. If you don’t care about yourself and your deeper nurture through the integration of your multiple personas, you will instead live as a caricature of your dominant persona. You will gradually become more and more unlike the real you and more like the artificial persona. You will lose yourself in the persona and role, like a stage actor who plays a single role so famously and effectively that the actor loses the actor’s own self and can no longer break out of the role.
Abandonment
Yet if you try stripping away your personas as you discover them, you won’t come any closer to your genuine self. You will instead deprive yourself of the opportunity to test, explore, and develop your capacities. You will trap yourself in a single identity, one that will promptly show its cracks as the identity fails to incorporate and accommodate dominant and powerful aspects of your genuine self. Your single identity will also fail to serve you in different contexts in which you must operate. Your authentic self has universal traits all of us share, essential traits for who you are, contextual traits for where you find yourself operating, and optional traits that you might wish to explore and develop. Abandoning personas deprives you of distinguishing your traits, turning you into a monolith that will inevitably topple and crack. We become ourselves not by paring our traits but instead by integrating our traits, to access them as we need to live our lives fully. Don’t immediately cast off your personas, as you discover yourself acting through them. Instead, draw the attributes of your deeper character that they are reflecting into your integrated whole. You may, all at once, find yourself the quiet one, jokester, achiever, and lover, and both bold and cautious, in a rich, varied, complex, and resonant whole.
Consciousness
The solution, then, is to be conscious of the persona you are deploying in each situation you find yourself. Stand transcendent over your personas so that you have the capacity to evaluate, control, and incorporate them into your genuine self. To know that you’re playing a role is to be authentic. To think that you’re being authentic when instead you’re playing a role is fake. Identity doesn’t truly exist. Identity is instead adaptation. Actors aren’t faking it. They are consciously adopting and embodying a role in order to convey something through the script that calls for it. Actors play many roles, taking one character off and putting another character on as the theatrical presentation calls for it. They are not slaves to the role but manipulators of it, giving it their interpretation in the setting that calls for it. To become more conscious of your personas, name them, and then dialogue with them through your active imagination. Have one of your personas speak to another of your personas. They probably already do without your realizing so.
Strategic
Use your personas deliberately and strategically. Doing so serves your growth, approaches your authentic self, and separates you from the collective darkness through which we live our lives when unconscious. Identities have purposes. You wouldn’t act as a parent toward a friend. You’d instead adopt the persona of a friend. You wouldn’t act as a friend toward your child. You’d instead adopt the persona of a parent. Effective character involves having multiple appropriate personas and being able to deploy them in fitting situations. While you are the intimate lifelong partner of your spouse, you may need or want at different times to adopt the persona of an encourager, comforter, guide, or friend. If you truly want your marriage to grow, you might even at times want to be the critic, competitor, or co-adventurer, as long as you can strategically and sensitively deploy and redeploy the fitting roles.
Construction
You can also construct and reconstruct personas, once you are conscious of the ones you currently possess and how you are deploying them. Doing so isn’t a matter of manipulating your demeanor and behaviors to influence or control others. If all you’re doing is faking it, your heart won’t be in it, you won’t do it well or for very long, and others will notice and not respond. Constructing a new persona is instead locating aspects of your authentic self that inform and energize you, and giving those dimensions of your actual potential a new vehicle through which to express themselves. Treat new challenges this way, not as simply as learning new skills but instead as trying out new personas through which to tap into your true potential self. You may need the persona in order to release your innate capacity and develop the skill. Personas allow you to experiment with becoming someone who you are not yet but might soon be, as an expression of your deeper self.
Failure
With this approach, if you fail, it’s only the persona, and not the real you who fails. Identity brings structure, and when the identity fails, the structure crumbles with it, at psychological cost. Interchangeable identity thus becomes psychological armor that you can put on, take off, modify, repair, and adapt, while protecting your inner authentic self. If, for instance, your public speaking flops because of your nerves, it’s only your inadequate persona. Refine the inadequate persona into a more-confident vision, and your next public talk won’t flop. Personas are safe spaces within which to experiment with your persona, where you can chalk failure up to the inadequacy of your persona rather than the inadequacy of you. Personas are like simulations where your true self is projecting a constructed self into a situation. Personas are also like a trial balloon so that you can see which way it floats and where it lands. If you always play the responsible persona but cannot take adequate risks because of it, try a different persona, maybe not the irresponsible persona but instead the experimenter or test dummy. Transcend your need for a fixed persona, to discover your deeper and fuller self.
Authenticity
Personas, although not your real self, allow you to discover your authenticity. The persona that feels fake and flops clearly isn’t who you are. Yet the persona that resonates within you and with others may be showing you something authentic about yourself. Personas are the most inauthentic things about us but have a way of pointing us toward our genuine self. For example, if playing the healer resonates with you, you may discover that you have deep capacity for compassion. If playing the trickster resonates with you, you may discover that you have unusual discernment for others’ vulnerabilities. If playing the fool resonates with you, you may discover that you have unusual discernment for others’ pretensions. When you are conscious of your personas, they move you toward your true self. You integrate the effective aspects of personas into your genuine self. The personas become capacities. The more personas you have, when conscious of them, the more authentic you become. When, though, personas instead remain unconscious to you, they may be keeping you away from being yourself. Your consciousness of your multiple personas is the you for which you are searching. Authenticity thus involves psychological fluidity among multiple trusted and conscious personas.
Reflection
List your personas, all the ones that you can discern. Then rank and re-rank them in order of: (a) your preference for them, the ones in which you feel most assured and comfortable; (b) others’ familiarity with them, the ones in which they see you most naturally and most often. Have you had any consciousness of your personas, perhaps in the momentary sense that you were simply acting as the situation required? Have you ever had the sense of stepping back to watch yourself playact, nearly to critique your own performance? Have you caught yourself from time to time in the wrong persona for the situation and had the wherewithal to swap personas adroitly in and out, to salvage the situation? What new persona might you try putting on, to solve a challenge that you’re currently facing and that your dominant identity doesn’t seem to be helping you get past? Could you try out a new persona with a particularly troublesome person, someone to whom you can’t seem to relate?
Key Points
Identity is something acquired apart from the deeper genuine you.
You have multiple personas that you swap in and out for the situation.
You have unconsciously constructed your personas as adaptations.
You filter your thoughts, attitudes, and actions through your personas.
Your personas are not the genuine you but are artificial or inauthentic.
You cannot abandon all personas without crushing the genuine you.
Develop and deploy your personas strategically to respect the real you.
Be conscious of your personas and projection of them to master them.
Adopt a risk-taking persona to overcome your fear of failure.
Discern your authentic self as varying personas resonate with you.