Fighting the Identities Imposed on You

Here is a project I have been working at for years: resisting the systems that install an identity in you.

Almost everything you are told you are was assigned rather than chosen, usually before you could object. The question is how much of it to accept, and my answer is: less than you currently do, and the exercise of reducing it is worth the discomfort.

Start With Your Name

Your name is the first thing your parents give you, and it is worth asking how attached to it you should be. My answer is: as little as possible.

This started for me with something trivial. My own name has two spellings in Hebrew, with and without an aleph. Do I care which is used?

I noticed that I did not. And having noticed that I did not care about the small version of the question, the large version became available: is my name part of me at all?

The obvious reply is that it could be entangled with real history. Children mocking you at school, someone abusing you over how it sounds — such experiences are real and they are part of your history.

But notice the move that follows. Those experiences are part of your history; they are not your name. And more importantly, they should not be permitted to dictate your life. The question is not whether the name was involved in something that happened to you. It is whether the label itself is a component of what you are.

It is not.

The Same Treatment, Down the List

Your religion. Assigned at birth in the overwhelming majority of cases, which is itself the strongest argument against taking it seriously as a discovery about the universe.

The country you grew up in. An accident of where your parents happened to be standing, converted by decades of ceremony into something people will die for.

Your language. Installed at eighteen months by whoever raised you. Does proficiency in a particular language define you? Should you let it? I do not see why. It is a tool you were handed, and the fact that it happens to be the one you think in is a fact about your infancy, not about your nature.

The Objection I Take Seriously

There is a strong reply here and I do not want to skip it.

Identity is not only imposed; it is also load-bearing. People with a firm sense of who they are cope better, act more consistently, and are harder to manipulate. Stripping identity away can leave someone unmoored rather than free — and the people who have historically been most eager to dissolve individual identities have not usually had good intentions.

I think the answer is that there is a difference between holding an identity and being held by one. Knowing you are shaped by a language and a place is accurate. Believing that the shaping is you, and defending it accordingly, is the error. You can keep the whole inheritance while declining to treat it as sacred.

What I Actually Want to Know

The question this note is really about is how.

How do you shed these? How do you deny them without pretending you were never shaped? What does it feel like from inside to hold a nationality lightly, or a mother tongue, or a name?

Each of these systems wants to make you a component of itself — that is what they are for, and they are extremely good at it. The pull is not obvious from inside, which is what makes the small cases valuable: the spelling of a name is trivial enough that you can examine your attachment to it honestly, and what you find there generalises.

More to come, when I have worked out more of it.