week 13
barrier to focus: identity disconnects
It struck me recently that the vast majority of my life I have felt a disconnect between how I feel on the inside and how others have viewed me. One of my family’s favorite stories about me (if not the ultimate favorite) is how, when I was almost three years old, I threw a fit at the circus because I wanted to be in the circus and not just watching it. When my mom pulled me out of the audience seat and into the hall to me I couldn’t just run away and join the circus, I melted into tears. “I don’t even have a life!” I shouted. It was this that made my mom start laughing, which confused me because I thought I was about to get into trouble. A passerby asked how old I was. “Almost three,” she said. He turned to me and said “you’re three years old, you’re not supposed to have a life!” Which of course made me cry harder.
I remember this incident, though my family thinks I just remember being told it. I remember the blue and gray stripes on the wall. I remember the look on my mom’s face as she knelt down on the sticky floor to look me in the eye. I remember the floating, out of body experience and the little voice in me that said it was going to be a long, long time before I would do what I wanted to do and have others see me how I wanted to be seen, but that I would get there and that it would be worth it. I held onto that little voice for the next thirty years.
I held onto it when I went to school and to be told day after day how quiet I was, asked how quiet I was, or told that I should speak up more. It always surprised me, confused me, and then really, really annoyed me. Inside, I felt like… maybe like a Barbara Streisand. Though I wouldn’t know who she was for a long time, I felt like a star, an icon, and most of all someone who was confident and sure of herself, what she wanted, and her place in the world. Of course, looking back, I know I was the quiet kid who had the good luck of a few close friends. But at the time the disconnect seemed so perplexing, because I felt that my true self was somehow invisible to everybody else and I couldn’t figure out how to change my outside to make people see my inside.
The disconnect might have been what saved me. As perpetually frustrated as I was, I took no one’s opinion of me more seriously than I took my own opinion of me. “I’ll show them,” seemed to be my defining motto of my various childhood eras.
As an adult, I still experience the disconnect between how I typically perceive others viewing me and how I view myself. We often take on our jobs as stand-ins for our identities (I’ve heard it’s a particularly American habit), and “teacher” holds a specific kind of identity in people’s minds, as does “special education teacher,” as does the specific “teacher of students with visual impairments.” This is what I do to earn a living, though it holds such a weighted feeling of identity, in a way that I can’t imagine some other jobs (say, “accountant”) would. But on the inside, I feel more like a “writer,” or simply “creative.”
My screenwriting coach is constantly talking about the importance of a writer’s group, not just for getting feedback on my work and making connections, but as a reinforcer of my identity as a writer. “Your friends and family will see it as just this hobby you do in between all the other roles you fill, but you need people in your life who understand how seriously you take it and to help reinforce your identity as a writer.”
It is so important to not underestimate the role of identity in the daily habits we do and decisions we make. A big obstacle to focusing on writing is that writing has long been the thing that fills in the cracks of my life— important by keeping me and my life together, but not the major focus of the overall picture of my life. “A writer who teaches” paints a very different kind of picture than “a teacher who writes.”
I wonder how I often I think about my own identity as a writer, and how I can potentially experiment with it in small ways. How can I externally act to reinforce that identity to myself— and to other people, who may then mirror back that identity to myself? Getting up early and writing three pages of morning pages (thank you, Julia Cameron) every single day, no matter what, was a great first step in that identity reinforcer. So is this blog. So is my writing group. I wonder, what else can I do to prove to myself that I am a writer? Maybe submit my writing much more frequently. Maybe continue to work on writing one project at a time each day until completion, until it is as engrained a habit as my morning pages ritual. Maybe go to more events with other writers/ artists/ filmmakers and introduce myself as a writer. Maybe ask myself that if my sole job was making a living as a writer, what sorts of different choices would I be making? Or, if I had to suddenly making a living as a writer, what sorts of different choices would I be making? Simply asking myself these questions as an exercise is liberating.
I know I am not alone in wondering about other paths and identities life could hold. I think we are all a rainbow of various identities, some of which we show the world, others of which we show our families, others of which we may only see ourselves, others of which exist in alternate realities or only in our imaginations. All of which are important. Many of which need more nurturing. These are the ideas I am constantly struggling with, but maybe I’ll start viewing them as ideas to be played with instead.
