If you are not your job, then who are you?
I continue to be fascinated by identity. I don’t mean identity on the Internet, I mean one’s personal, internal identity. I’m referring to the identity at the center of the question, “Who am I?” I’ve explored and written about identity previously, focusing on the collective identity of the USA. Lately, I’ve been reading more about identity in Eckhart Tolle’s book, A New Earth, and wanted to share some of what I’m thinking about as I continue processing these ideas.
I’m curious how you reacted when you read the title of this blog post. One reaction might be, “Of course I’m not my job, my job is just what I do.” I agree. Let me try a different version of the title: “If are not your job title, then who are you?” OK, that’s a bit more specific. What is the relationship between you and your job title? A job title is the name of a role that you play in a vocational context. The vocational context is one of many contexts you navigate throughout your lifetime. You might play the role of “daughter” in the context of your nuclear family. Or the role of “man” in the context of public places. Or the role of “Peruvian” in the context of nationality.
Do you feel a boundary between who you are and the roles you play across the many contexts of your life? Or do you find it difficult to differentiate between who you are and these roles you play? I’ve found that some roles are harder to separate from “who I am” than others. Let’s take a simple example.
I played high school and college football. For those 8 years, I identified strongly as a football player. I was 21 when I lost this role. My team was in the Division III playoffs and it was clear we were about to lose the game, which meant my “football player” role was about to expire. (Unsurprisingly, the NFL never showed any interest in me, so that game was the end of the road for me.) I grieved that loss at the time. It was a bitter pill, but I gradually moved on. Some folks have an easier time with this than I did, and transition as easily as water rolling off a duck’s back. Some folks have a harder time than I did, and cling to their role like Uncle Rico.
Like Uncle Rico, most of us hit a moment in our lives when we struggle with understanding who we are if we aren’t <role name>. This struggle usually happens unintentionally due to a loss, and it’s commonly referred to as an “identity crisis”. There is work we can do to prepare ourselves to handle these losses more gracefully.
I’ve found pondering my identity separately from my roles to be a helpful exercise. First, I had to consider the many roles I play, and second, reflect on which ones feel stickier. Some examples of sticky roles for me: father, provider, man. The roles of “father” and “provider” are fairly coupled, given our society’s expectations of parents and, especially historically, fathers. Obviously, “father” and “man” are quite coupled. But it’s easy for me to remember my younger years before I was a father. Thinking of the 24 years that I lived before I took on the role of “father”, I can remember having a fairly established identity, so I can rationally separate my self from “father”. But my role of “provider” followed closely behind, and quickly became unconsciously ingrained in my conception of my self. Once a role becomes unconsciously ingrained in us, our reactions to any threats to that role can get intense, like Uncle Rico. That is what an identity crisis looks like, and until you can differentiate who you are from the role you’ve lost, life can be incredibly painful.
This brings me to the role of “man” that I play. For those of us who are cisgendered, our gender role is possibly the most unconscious of all roles. Cisgendered people like me have played a relatively consistent gender role since the day we were born. Our families and communities identified us as that role every day from the moment they discovered our birth sex. It’s hard (for me) to imagine a more unconsciously ingrained role in our civilization. Pondering my identity separately from my gender role has been the most (helpfully) mind-blowing way to consider who I am, creating conscious space between my roles and my identity.
These aforementioned ponderings result in a process of elimination rather than some sort of big revelation. Each role I ponder, I make progress toward knowing who I am not. I’ve found there’s a different process for discovering who I am, which, I will save for a future post. Suffice it to say, at this moment, my experience of who I am is synonymous with my life’s purpose. I expect to have some more nuanced thoughts on this once I finish A New Earth.
Coming back to the title of this post, I expect many of the people who find themselves reading these words will have a strong vocational identity. Your identity may not be tied to your actual job title, but it’s likely tied strongly to your career and some widely-held view of what success looks like. I’ve navigated that vocational boundary (or lack thereof) for decades now. The sheer terror that one can feel at the prospect of appearing to be, or feeling like, a failure in the vocational context, is a signal that your identity is unconsciously tied to your job (or career, or business, etc.). In response to this fear, people can work incredibly long hours, putting their relationships and health at risk in the process. Instead of fear and terror, others of us can feel the obsession of ambition. We aren’t fleeing from failure, we are sprinting toward success. For those of us who walk this unconscious road of ambition, I can do no better than suggest listening to the words of poet David Whyte on that topic.
Recently, I’ve been feeling a bit of this fear that comes from the prospect of failure. I’m a small business owner, looking at the diminished prospects of Red Squirrel’s sales funnel, concerned about the economy and how it will impact our company’s health. Historically, my unconscious role of “provider” would have reacted harshly to this economic anxiety. I wouldn’t be sleeping, I wouldn’t be exercising or meditating, I wouldn’t be paying attention to my posture at my desk, I wouldn’t ever be fully present with my family. After doing some of this identity differentiation work, though, I’m finding myself quite calm in the face of this storm. Certainly not passive, certainly energized to solve the problem, hustle, and find creative solutions to weather the storm. The calmness comes from accepting that even if I lose every one of my roles, even my most precious ones, I will still be me. My life might change drastically, but I will still be here, still striving toward my life’s purpose: to unleash latent human potential.
If you’d like to subscribe to my Software Therapy newsletter, sign up here.
