Transcending identity
I have many identities. I’m a bipolar librarian, an American Unitarian. I’m a lesbian, a daughter, a sister, a mother, an ex-wife and ABD for my Ph.D. Some of my identities are more fluid than others. Some are hard-wired, whereas others are an allegiance by choice. I didn’t choose to be a sister or a daughter, just as I didn’t chose be lesbian or bipolar.
Probably the more interesting parts of my identity are those I’m somewhat ambivalent about. For instance, I’m not entirely sure being an American describes me, though I’m a citizen and have lived here my entire life. I think “patriot” is a manipulative term and one that I embrace for myself with trepidation. I believe in the people I know and in many of the ideals that our country ostensibly stands for, but then I know that those ideals have been used as weapons in wars of ideology throughout the world and used to justify horrors that might have had other underlying secret causes, like greed or oil.
I’m also not sure some of the terms bandied about having to do with patriotism and the nation mean the same thing from person to person in our country.
I bristle somewhat when my Canadian friends criticize Americans and characterize us as brash, ignorant, or unthinking. At those moments I defend my country’s people and point out that we’re not all the same, that I’m a rather quiet and informed American, and that I take exception to the characterization that we’re all extraverted clowns.
When I studied abroad in Denmark at the ripe old age of 23, I spent my first semester trying to blend in, tiptoeing around the dorm and trying not to make any sudden movements or speak loudly. The Danes I knew seemed almost disappointed that I wasn’t going to provide entertainment in the form of loud gum-chewing or the gulping down of huge meals. By my second semester, though, I stopped caring so much what they thought of me, and oddly enough it was a lot more comfortable when I conformed to their idea of what an American should be — loudly laughing in the kitchen with my friends at 3 a.m. on a Friday night, loudly talking with my friends on the hallway phone, loudly stomping my way through the dorm early in the morning- being loud, loud, loud. It confirmed what they’d always suspected about me, and life was just easier that way.
Being a stereotypical American while outside the borders of this country was just easier.
Automatic American citizenship stems from being born on the soil of our country. This hasn’t always been the way citizens of a country are formed. My stepmother, for instance, is from Russia, was born and grew up in Moscow, but she has a passport that identifies her as Armenian. Americans are formed by their location at birth, and this, perhaps, lies at root of the discomfort so many people in this country feel at our southern border.
It’s in the seeking of self-knowledge that I find the most meaning. Identity might be a verb rather than a noun, a state of becoming rather than a state of being. I’m always figuring out who I am, and I have a feeling it will continue this way for the rest of my life. It’s part of the project of living. Transcending American identity means questioning the stereotypes, continually examining them for their truth and fiction, and it is impossible to rest anywhere for long.
What does it mean to be an American? It’s an uneasy identity, one that I can stand outside of and critique. I embrace it even as I push it away. Transcendence implies some kind of movement beyond something, into a new landscape. I don’t know what the alternative to having an affiliation to a nation would look like. Affiliation to religion? To humanity? To the Earth?Nation is a concept that exists more in the imagination of its citizen more than as a hard and fast set of personal characteristics. Transcending such an identity is tricky in that the concept itself is slippery. Any one person is not the ideal American, and it’s an unfocused set of clichés that tend to describe any individual in this country.
Can I find a place outside of my American identity where I’m comfortable, where I can transcend the implications of being an American, where I exist, separately and honestly? I’m not sure such a place exists. My many identities, uncomfortable as they are, guide the way I see myself in the world. I am a collection of contradictions and overlapping beliefs, as are we all.
