Identity, Intention, Illusion

This morning I’m thinking about identity.

We are a culture obsessed with identity. It’s a part of our cultural psychology, entrenched so deep it’s reflexive. And I think the obsession hints at a sort of cultural and personal amnesia. We don’t seem to know who we are anymore, and everything we do to define ourselves ends up ringing hollow.

I am not immune to this. When I look back at years of journals, I see trends. One of those is the ever-present “who am I?” though not necessarily couched as that specific question. Another is “I need to change.” That one, I think, may be at the core of an issue I’ve developed over the past ten years or so… anxiety.

Here’s what I’m thinking, and for the moment I’m treating it as real: Identity without intention is illusion.

And what that means, when I boil it down, is that if we are constantly trying on new aspects of identity as if they were articles of clothing, we’ll ultimately end up with an eclectic mishmash of an outfit. And that outfit will contain elements that we see as “us.” We’ll identify with every little frill and fringe, every cut and seam, every pocket and button and collar. But the whole of it will look and wear like chaos. And there will always, always feel like something is missing.

There will be a void, and we will never figure out how to fill it.

And that’s because we were not intentional about our design.

Last time, I wrote about Neil Gaiman’s mountain. And what I really liked about what he said was that he determined a goal, and set course for it. More than that, he used that goal as a metric for determining his choices and decisions. If something moved him toward the goal, he took it. If something moved him away, he left it alone.

Ultimately he determined, “I am this, and not that.” He set his identity up as an intention, and then lived according to that intention.

We tend to do the opposite, much of the time. Instead of setting an intention we pull on an affect. We decide that our identity is somehow related to the music we like, so we wear T-shirts promoting our favorite band and we dress and hold ourselves and comport ourselves according to what we think “someone who likes this music” should be. We behave according to some assumptions we’ve made, based on limited observations.

If we like reading, we dress and behave and speak as we believe someone who likes reading would do. If we question our religion, we take on characteristics of someone who is opposed to that religion, even if it means changing what we say, how we think, who we associate with.

There’s the danger of defining ourselves by what we are not. That’s always a pretty hollow experience.

That’s the illusion of our identity. We’re faking it, because we have no idea what else to do. And we have no idea what else to do because we don’t have any intention set firmly in mind. We don’t know where we’re going, so any map will do.

I’ve lived like this much of my life. Fifty years now, actually. And I can tell you, I’m not entirely where I thought I would be. I realize now, I didn’t get to where I wanted to go because I didn’t define where I was going. I had no intention set, I had not determined my goal. I hadn’t picked my mountain.

I knew a vague and general direction, and that’s brought me here. And here isn’t so bad. I’ve accomplished a lot, and have some success. Not the level of success I was expecting. And far more fails than wins, if we’re adding up the columns.

Consistent effort toward a goal will get you to that goal eventually. But you’re required to have the goal.

Our identities are tied up intimately with what we want to accomplish with our lives. But if we don’t determine what that is, if we don't decide on an intention for our lives, I promise you… I promise you… you will always feel an empty hollowness, and you will always, always question who you are.

Identity without intention is illusion.