“I don’t know what I would miss if my identity were taken away,” said one of the guests. He looked somewhat defiant. He was sitting a little further away and I couldn’t quite follow the conversation, but I suspect it was about the current use of the word ‘identity’.
It’s a fathomless comment – who would you be without your identity? Do you only have them for others? And even if that were the case, wouldn’t it matter if you didn’t have one, would that even be possible?
When you are alone, walking, reading, showering, you have no identity, at least not consciously. It doesn’t matter how old you are or what languages you speak. But as soon as someone puts their head around the corner, something changes. Not for every person, by the way. Although there are people who hardly bring about such a change in you. I often think of a passage in a novel by the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, where two people stand on a dirty train: “I always feel so good with you,” the doctor whispered in my ear. Me too, I said. When I’m with you, it’s as if you’re not even there, he muttered. I don’t understand it, I said, but I do understand you.”
I understand you too. A presence so familiar and good that you feel fine without ‘someone’ suddenly joining you.
Are you then without an identity? I think so. And what if it was always like this? It actually seems nice, you wouldn’t care about the world’s view at all.
When I walk through the supermarket, I don’t feel like someone with an identity – until I meet someone I know and realize that I cycled here straight after gym class, in my sweatpants, with muddy boots on (outside roads are quite difficult for cyclists). spray it) – then I suddenly feel like a person. More specifically, a messily dressed person. I guess that’s still not an identity, is it?
Abroad, or in a company of strangers, when you start talking to someone for a longer period of time, you want to say something about ‘who you are’ or you are asked about it. People usually ask: What do you do? Yes, logically, they no longer have to ask whether I am a man or a woman or what skin color I have – they will see that in a moment. And for myself, these are not important characteristics, because they are so obvious and visible that I don’t have to think about them.
Although – I always feel like a woman towards workmen, fortunately no longer a hunted one, but I suppose they will think that I cannot be taken so seriously. Less than my husband. And if I had a dark skin color in this white village, I would probably be aware of that often.
But is what you realize in certain circumstances also what you would like to call your identity?
You now read that people ‘identify as a white cisgender hetero woman’ or something like that, but that also seems to me to be a rather imposed identity, because who is that for themselves, a cisgender hetero. At most you are in contrast, if you were to feel a contrast at all, or if someone were to force that contrast on you. I think without contrast there is no identity.
So if that identity were taken away from you because the world didn’t care, you would feel just fine. And everyone else would feel fine too. No contradiction in sight.