how much will we let identity matter

We all identify as… something. From somewhere and someone(s). From some time. Perhaps for some reason. Sometimes I feel like these things matter to me, but most of the time I feel like they don’t in this inexplicable way.

The malaise of hearing people justify things according to their background is palpable, but I listen to it with an open mind anyways. Nobody wants to hear my cold, clinical reaction to such a normalized way of thinking.

I feel as if we are justifying ourselves not by what we should be doing, but what we feel we have a right to do based on which sack of skin we sit in.

I want to grab the world by the shoulders and say did we really get a choice?

Did we choose our origins, our families, our early life. How much of that was under our control. If I was in control of mine I’m 1000% sure it would have been different.

We all ended up where we started due to some divine form of RNG. If you believe in souls and all that, its as if they were sequestered into groups and scattered around the globe, finding the first body to fit in to that needed one.

The whole nature versus nurture argument perplexes me; it’s as if we have no semblance of our own plasticity.

We certainly are the way we are due to our identity, but as soon as you have the ability to comprehend that, you are likely at the point where you can form your own identity moving forward. We are grey matter, plastic as can be, we grow and change and morph. Once you are on your own to some degree, I would argue that a great deal of the reason you are the way you are is because you choose to be (save for mental conditions of course).

We mentally go through hoops and justifications to produce a story that makes sense to other people. I grew up like this so I’m like that. I had an experience like this so I react to similar things like that.

Yes its all true, but the action of contextualizing it in your brain and explaining it to others as a constant of your being is what will keep you from ever changing.

We are social creatures, very much to a fault. Everything has to be done in a way that can be processed and understood. Nothing can just be the way it is with as complicated reasons as it exists. That’s not to say that it can’t be unraveled or that it shouldn’t be.

But we should give ourselves credit for being varied personalities, enough so that something as simple as an origin story decades ago isn’t the sole reason for the shoes we stand in today. It blows my mind how comfortable we are with willingly relinquishing ownership of our selves and assigning past actions to its outcome.

For some of us this might matter, but I’m willing to wager money that we unconsciously choose to be the way we are and contextualize the reasoning for it in things we can’t control so we don’t have to bear the burden of ownership of our own actions.

It’s a game of chicken between how many mistakes we can blithely make and how much we can write off in the name of “it’s just who I am”. This kind of thinking places an unknown fear in the back of my mind that I might be unconsciously doing the same.

I try my best (repeat: try) to take ownership of my psyche. Sure I’m Turkish, I’m Circassian, I’m in my 20s, I’m in computer science, I could go on and on about things that I can “identify” with. But being around things of that nature don’t satiate me in the same way that creating the stuff of my dreams does. Does it matter the background who I do it with? They could be from anything and be anyone, but I appreciate people who I can share camaraderie with, as that to me is more valuable than the sharing of identity.

As a Circassian in America, I’m used to being the only one of my kind anywhere and everywhere. I can’t expect to say words of my ethnic background and have people understand, no matter what race or ethnicity they are, just statistically speaking they are unlikely to know what I am saying. I’m used to being alone culturally in this land.

And yet, when I think about the loneliness I feel, I don’t think it would be solved with more Circassians. Yes there is a great hole in my being that comes from being in a country where your people have a small, disconnected diaspora. But it feels small compared to the yearning I have to be around people who inspire me, which transcends cultural boundaries and contexts. I feel like it’s also more valuable and rare (again, statistically speaking), partially because the drive of personality is not something you can just be born into, like identity. It’s something you create with the ounces of your being. Something you strive towards while living life, not something you secure at the beginning of your life when you were without volition.

Maybe I’m in the minority with this value system, but it’s what enters my head every time I turn over the thoughts of identity in conversation or in my head. I wish I could “identify” as a game developer and then come from a family of game developers. Or “identify” as a dreamy, extroverted creator and have a country of similar people I could hail from where everyone there shared that passion. Maybe a couple syllable word that we could have to ourselves and I could say I’m an “xyz” and feel a sense of patriotic pride.

Instead, I have a couple ethnonyms, which are easy one-word descriptions of where I am from, but say little about who I am. Seems like a strange set of priorities for humanity to uphold, but I guess its the only feasible ones. This is not to say that I’m not proud to be Turkish or Cerkez, but they say a more about the body I was born with and less about the mind I have built for myself.

I wish it would be more encouraged for us to be proud of the identity we have constructed for ourselves rather than the identity we were assigned.

Originally published on Substack. View the source version ↗