About 'Identity'
For three years most of my life - sometimes my entire life - was consumed by the the Volunteer Army Foundation and Student Volunteer Army that it sprang from. What started as a spontaneous thing on the side quickly grew into 'the best use of my spare time', then 'my job', then 'my job AND my spare time AND my social circle'.
On the second day of February last year I had two sudden realisations slap me in the face.
- I don't want to marry the amazing young woman I thought I love
- My job/life is slowly killing me. Well, that's a bit dramatic, but you get my point.
When you remove these two key defining features from your life it leaves some fairly enormous holes. That all-too-common social question "So, what do you do, J?" suddenly became a frightening personal intrusion that made me seem like a flaky crazy person when trying to answer it. The logical step for someone with a family history of mental illness is to, of course, assume the worst of oneself. What DO I do? I feel like I'm still really busy but what am I ACTUALLY doing? Is it useful? What are you doing with your life? Who are you really? You know the drill.
This site existed in the first instance to help me grapple with these questions. First to provide some structure for myself, and then to help my Mom* understand 'What I do'**. For the last year I've really been struggling with this notion of identity. I'm no longer 'Jason from Volunteer Army' but I'm still 'Jason' and yes I was from Volunteer Army. The realisation that I am a fundamentally different person now than what I was on say, February 21st 2011, was overwhelming and terrifying.
Recently I spent a long weekend at a conference/retreat with a group of amazing people, and disappeared from Auckland to Rotorua for 24 hours for the wedding of an old uni friend/flatmate in the middle. The weekend was a very open and safe space, so I'd shared this challenge of identity with all of these people. Returning from the wedding to the retreat turned out to be an amazing day that collided the major timelines of my life.
- 8am: Driving a uni friend (who I've barely seen post-quakes) to Rotorua Airport. Tom categorically knows Jason as Jason before the Earthquakes.
- 11am: Happen to stumble upon my Mom at our old house in Hamilton. It's on the market so I called past to reminisce, and turns out she was up to work through the details of a purchase offer. In a moment of pure childhood, she replaces my broken suitcase with a functional one that's being used as storage at the house. We then continue discussing the housing market.
- 2pm: I arrive back at the retreat to new friends who know Jason as 'Jason who showed up to the retreat', as well as friends who know the evolution of Jason out of Volunteer Army.
It dawned on me that, on that day, despite living in many stages of my life I had been exactly myself all day. Realising that I am exactly who I am was one of the most ridiculously simple yet satisfying feelings I've ever had. My identity is independent of 'what I do', 'where I'm from', 'my partner/friends/social circles', 'what other people think of me/my work/where I'm from etc etc', no matter how closely related they might feel.
The key step towards 'a life that works' that came out of this was the idea of presence. Too often had I spent time physically here but mentally/emotionally/academically somewhere else. Worrying about this, trying to figure that out, remembering that time that... How often do you just be, where you are, surround by who or what you are surrounded by and be there? Actually BE there, doing whatever you should be doing - there?
My new challenge is to be able to do that 100% of the time, in everything I do. Laundry to board meetings.
--
*Yes, my siblings and I learnt to speak in America so we and my Kiwi parents all refer to Mom as Mom - rather than Mum.
**That was a hilarious conversation on the phone one day:
Mom: So, you need to, I think, write something down for me to say because people are always asking after you kids and every time I try to describe what you do it comes out worse and worse
Me: Haha who cares if it sounds rubbish, I can't even describe what I do to myself let alone anyone else
Mom: No really darling please, when I start sometimes I start speaking as if you're a spy and other times it sounds like you're just lounging around unemployed but kind of working with some international things.. I don't know!