What is Identity?
Identity has been an interesting challenge throughout my life.
As a small child, as much as I can recall, I was a loner. I had little to nothing in common with the other kids in my neighborhood, for several reasons I don’t need to go into here. Suffice it to say, much of my time was spent playing pretend on my own, or coming up with cool adventures for my Star Wars action figures in my own variation of the Expanded Universe.
There is no doubt in my mind it was during this period my imagination was unlocked. It was at age nine that I wrote and illustrated my first sci-fi story, and numerous other worlds began to evolve inside my head.
Later, somewhere in Middle School or High School, I shifted my identity, and put on a mask in order to fit in with a group of people. Because of my underlying fear of abandonment, developing friendships and finding means to get people to like me would took such a priority in my life that, for years and years, having people accept me became more important than nearly anything else that mattered.
In college I was introduced to the Society for Creative Anachronism. After college, I got much more heavily into the medieval reenactment…fencing, attending events, socializing. I got in so deep that the SCA, for a time, mattered more to me than my real life. It should come as no surprise that this would lead to something of an identity crisis.
I was existing as two separate people. My “mundane” self, and my medieval identity. It was not entirely healthy, because living in the SCA isn’t conducive to paying bills and affording food, shelter and such.
Reclaiming my identity
Part of why this happened was because in my real life, I was dissatisfied with who I was. My jobs tended to suck, direction was non-existent, and I felt disconnected. On the other hand, in the SCA I did activities that made me feel good, I had a path I was definitely following, and I felt totally connected.
Living a dual-life, however, was pretty unhealthy. I was struggling with depression, and having a truly difficult time living day-to-day.
No, I didn’t “find god,” become “reborn” or some other major revelation. The transformation of who I would become didn’t happen immediately after I got hit by the car crossing the street…but that was where I began. Slowly, almost painfully slowly, I started to merge my real life with the SCA life, and moved to become who I am today.
The SCA was my escape. In that version of the world I felt like I was more than just a cog in a machine, I was someone. When I finally came to realize how important it was that I also exist as a whole being in the world around me, I started to strive for understanding.
My standard answer to the questions who are you and what do you want and who do you want to be was, simply, I don’t know. For years, I was really good at knowing what I DID NOT WANT, and also how not to do certain things, but what did I desire from life? I had no idea.
What I did come to desire was to be whole. With help, professional and from people I love, I stopped being afraid all the time, and I discovered who I was, and who I wanted to be.
Because life is ever-changing, this is, of course, an ongoing process.
My current identity is built from my past
One of the things I’ve come to understand is that, since life is always changing, who I am now is a result of my thoughts, feelings and intentional actions of the past. Consciousness creates reality. I made my life this way, either consciously or subconsciously. Recognizing this, I can work more on using my consciousness to manifest the reality I most desire.
It has taken a long time for me to reach this point. But once I began working on becoming truly whole, merging the person I was in the real world with the person I was in the SCA, I started to find real balance. With that, things changed, and brought me to where I am today.
Yet my identity is still changing. I know that this will always be the case. As I grow and evolve and learn new things, they will change how I identify myself. For a project I started recently, I’ve gone back to reread all of my Pathwalks; the evolution of these is somewhat stunning to observe. Compared to reading my old paper journals from my late twenties and thirties, I’m a far more positive and content person now.
As I see different aspects of my identity as separate, Crossing the Bridges was created with the intent of bringing them closer together. This has always been about identity. Knowing who I am, who I was, and who I desire to be, I know a great deal of what I need to do to get from here to there.
As always, thank you for crossing the bridges between my worlds with me.
This is the eighty-sixth entry of my personal journey, the Crossing the Bridges series. My collectively published writing can be found here.
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