We are all of us descended from creatures who—while figuring out how to feed and protect themselves in an oft-dangerous and unfriendly world—somehow found the time to invent poetry, trebuchets, the microprocessor, and Love Is Blind.
We contain multitudes, in other words, but many of our social norms and internal pressures hobble or compress our multifarious natures, flattening our full complexity into something easier to label and organize.
We thus end up narrowly self-defining for public consumption. We’re not not omnicapable: we’re an accountant. We’re a mother. We’re Disc Golf Guy.
In reality even the most focused among us are far more than the labels we wear. Few mothers are just mothers, few disc golf enthusiasts never leave the course. These labels sprawl like over-stretched beach umbrellas, struggling to cover the full complexity of rich, varied lives.
But our societies are set up in such a way that there’s little benefit to (or sometimes limited opportunity in) being all the things we are.
An accountant might find their career capped if they load their resume with information about their (by any metric) impressive LEGO sculptures. Parents who gush about their enthusiasm for microbiology may, in the course of conversation, be pressured to speak only about their children (despite having the time, attention, and enthusiasm for both their offspring and Archaea).
If we’re in a context in which the goal is simply to keep the lights on, or to be socially palatable (in a vanilla sort of way), this is fair enough. That potential employer is looking for evidence of your accounting chops, not your scuba diving certification. That fellow parent at the party is looking for shared experiences to concisely bond over, not chasing your life story.
But many of us allow these siloed versions of ourselves to become the only version we present to the world, and that tendency can echo through our social and professional spaces until we eventually think of ourselves—our shimmering, crystalline selves—as the mono-dimensional, made-for-consumption paper dolls we play-act out of prudence or politeness.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, as the incentives that pervade many such spaces nudge us into whittling ourselves into the proper situational shape. There are benefits to doing so, in other words, and so it makes sense that we might try to reap those benefits by adhering to those norms.
I suspect, though, that these are the forces (or some of the forces) behind the malaise and identity issues many adults face when they wake up one day and realize they’re not living the lives they want, or the lives they feel they were meant to live.
Folks who remain flexible, who have a malleable sense of self, will generally just roll with the punches; they have a fond familiarity with rethinking, reshaping, and pivoting.
People whose identities are more fixed and rigid, however, are more likely to suffer cracks and straining when the need for change arises.
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