Identity: a history of contexts instead of a list of “done”
Sometime after I started studying Visual Communication, I began to ask myself — at first — How can I design compelling communication? Further on, this question changed to — How can I create conscious communication? And then again, in — How can I be aware as a communicator?
At that time, I did not yet know the HMWQ — but apparently, I was using it.
I was still far enough from design thinking and the entire mindset behind it, but I felt the need to put my work in a bigger picture and move the center from the output to the “me” person.
A too-tiny room, a designer in love, and a test.
I remember perfectly one of his phrases, as simple as apparently commonplace:
If you want to do this job, you are subject to various falling in love. If you don’t fall in love with the problem someone poses to you, the solution won’t come.
For me, it was as if time had stopped for a few seconds.
Tools, maps, and workshops later — I found myself dealing with the How Might We statement exactly to reframe a problem statement into a positive, aspirational question. Mine was — How do I create impact, not necessarily the biggest, but the one with more value for the communities I’m part of?
My pivot had begun. There was no turning back.
To understand which professional I would like to be, I started working on my identity, not in terms of personal branding but as a complex ecosystem of values, needs, ambitions, and limits. Along this path, there was another stunning stop: Taiye Selasi, a writer and photographer, born in England and grew up in the United States, of Ghanaian and Nigerian descent.
I jumped into her incredible Ted Talk speech about the concept of identity and the question they ask her most frequently, Where are you from? (listening to her biography story, we can understand why this is a so crucial question.) I have listened to it as much as my favorite songs of that moment. [here is the link, you will love her]
How could I come from a nation? How can a human being come from a concept? […] What if we asked, instead of “Where are you from?” — “Where are you a local?” This would tell us so much more about who and how similar we are. Our experience is where we’re from.
She proposed a three-step test that I would like to share here with you.
The three “R’s”: rituals, relationships, and restrictions.
The first “R” stands for our Rituals: think of our daily rituals, whatever they may be; making coffee, driving to work, taking off shoes at home, saying prayers, and so on. What kind of rituals are these? Where do they occur? In what city or cities in the world do shopkeepers know our faces? The rituals are familiar.
The second “R” stands for our Relationships, which shape our days and emotional experiences. To whom do we speak at least once a week, face-to-face or on a video call? These relationships are home for us.
The last and less cute “R” stands for Restrictions. How we experience our locality depends partly on our restrictions. By restrictions, she meant, where are we able to live? What passport do we hold? Are we restricted by racism from feeling fully at home where we live? Here the question takes us past Where are you now? to Why aren’t you there?
She suggested taking a piece of paper and putting those three words on top of three columns, trying to fill those columns as honestly as we could. A very different picture of our life in a local context, of our identity as a set of experiences, may emerge.
On a journey to consciousness and resonance.
During the COVID-19 pandemic months, just before I found out I was expecting my daughter, I decided it was time to make space, and I landed in Cocoon Pro from the door of the C4 — Care 4, a series of content devised to take you on journeys of discovery, and so it was. It opened the doors to an immense horizon for me.
The journey was the “Grow by Resonance” series, hosted by Claudia Pellicori and Letizia Piangerelli. Four weeks spent mapping my personal life and trying to converge with the professional one. A protected space to work on oneself and one’s identity as a resonance between the different spaces we inhabit: that of relationships, that of needs, of the value others receive from us, and so on.
What would happen if we stopped momentarily to think of ourselves as an ecosystem instead of sending pieces of us forward like loose cannons into the universe of realization?
How many choices would we have made differently from the ones we are experiencing if we had asked ourselves, “Where should I be” or “What makes me truly credible, solid, coherent for myself”?
How many fewer times, perhaps, would I have gotten lost? Or would I have chosen to get lost?
The future is certainly not an exact formula, and this was not the promise of their canvas. But the idea that my being, my identity, is a history of contexts instead of a list of “done”, puts me in a position to recognize it better and live the experiences I encounter with less sense of loss.
Coming back to Selasi and her test, I see a pattern. The three R’s are just a part of a bigger dials system; my professional life is one of these experiences my identity is made of.
The ritual should be not to update my CV but to re-align and re-position myself in a continuous and non-linear process, cyclically as nature does. Myself as a person, not as an output. Becoming a practitioner of this method enables the power of conscious choice.
Places shape experiences.
Nowadays, I am writing this piece as a contributor of Cocoon Pro. From this perspective, I feel I am exploring an organization that is continually committed to trying to move together, that re-aligns itself, questioning the real facts made of the measured, the perceived, and the felt. Three non-exclusive but corroborating spheres, which I also learned to take care of in my life.
For sure, it is more delicate, deeper, and more energetically expensive work. Why to do it?
Because awareness is the most spendable, enabling, and performing output. Real growth is unattainable without awareness. Living in resonance empowers us to manage significant actions, nurture them, and possibly even modify them without losing sight of the path we’re on.
Sure, I still ask myself — How do I create impact, not necessarily the biggest, but the one with more value for the communities I’m part of?
But now I do it by living in a [creation] space that allows and encourages me to create as many responses as possible, to measure myself every day, never alone. In a highly connected and “conversational” space, where the meeting between storytelling, listening, and learning is facilitated.
A space where the sense of the word experience, regarding both oneself and the Organization, is nurtured to understand where to be in the middle of this relationship. Where do I feel comfortable to be? Why am I not there? (Reminder, to me, that restrictions also make identity).
