What's Your Narrative?
How do you see yourself? How do others see you? What’s your narrative?
By narrative, of course, I mean you, your story, your identity.
Where do you live? I live on Willy Street, Madison, WI, USA. Williamson, or “Willy Street”, is akin to a low-density, Midwest version of Greenwich Village in New York City…or perhaps a high-density version of Midsomer, the English village in the UK TV series, “Midsomer Murders”. The operative term here is “village”. In deciding (and being able) to buy a home in this neighborhood, I have chosen to wallow in “village life”. I surrender a not-so-small amount of privacy, and in return I see my neighbors daily, greet them and strangers as I walk out my front door onto the sidewalk, and on a regular basis pass judgement on things great and insignificant with my fellow villagers at the local pub, the Crystal Corners Bar. I am a villager.
What do you do? Most Americans parse their identities through the lens of work. We are what we do. I work in information technology, or IT. Does that make me a nerd? What about those for whom I work? I’ve worked in the public sector for almost 28 years. At the intersection of what I do and for whom I do it is either a dedicated public servant bureaucrat or a fat-cat, Big Government bureaucrat, depending on where the observer stands. I am an IT nerd. I am a bureaucrat.
What do you think? What are your politics? Do you slant Liberal or Conservative, Left or Right, “traditional” or “progressive”? People will decide such things, or think such ways, based on their Morality, either emphasizing the Individual, or that Individual’s relationship to a Group, or both1. I call myself a Liberal, but I am more conservative than many of my neighbors. Maybe they would call me a Conservative, or a Libertarian, depending on where they stand. Some in my family might think me a Socialist, given where they stand.
What roles do you play? I am married, so I am a husband. I am childless, so I am not a parent, an important personal fork in anyone’s life path. I am a brother, uncle, and friend.
Where we live, what we do, what we think, and the roles we play all form part of our identity. To this we can add what we believe, our hobbies, with whom we sleep, and a myriad of other things we do or think or say. We manifest ourselves through our identity (our distinguishing character or personality, to lift the dictionary definition2).
We also see our identity through the prism of our intelligence. Recall that our intelligence exists to scale social hierarchies, not to perform critical analysis3. We need to acknowledge that who we say we are is not necessarily who we really are. Do our words match our actions? The Universe is, after all, complex enough to render each of us a hypocrite at least once in our lives. Likewise our story could be self-serving. We could be lying to ourselves, or missing huge parts, or simply be wrong. We thus depend on both ourselves and others for definition, not simply to define our place in a social hierarchy. Truth can exist outside of us.
Let us add another variable to this mix, Time. Are you the same person you were yesterday? No. Last year? No. I was fat. I am no longer. People that only knew or saw me more than 5 years ago may still think me fat (and are surprised when they meet me again now). Likewise, I smoked, but no longer. Again, people that knew I smoked can be surprised to learn I do not smoke anymore. But fat or not, or smoking or not, Experience makes Change.
There are a multitude of factors that go into our identity, and over time. With so much to each of us, how can we easily define ourselves? If we are going to tell our story, what story do we tell? Given that there are are many of us in our Past, but only one of us in the Present, applying the KISS Principle here seems warranted (Keep it simple, Stupid). We neither want to wallow in the pain of past failures nor be distracted from the present by only living through past glories. Informed by the Past, we can act in the Present. And so we step forward, in word and action and deed, and define ourselves. The Buddha would approve. Christ would approve.
Will we be successful in conveying who we are to others? It depends on what we do, but it also depends on our conversation partners. We can only hope others are receptive to who we are. We cannot manage how someone will perceive us. Indeed, control over ourselves is hard enough. Thus conversation becomes paramount, given how others help define us. Indeed, the wider the range of conversation the better, given that we usually learn the most from those with whom we disagree. The best course of action is to at least extend to others the courtesy we desire for ourselves, to have an open mind. On this point, reciprocal altruism or “The Golden Rule” is not a bad starting point.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was right when he spoke of a dream for his children, where they could “…live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.4”. There is so much going into each person that seeing them first as anything other than just another person is trodding upon the path of bias and error. This puts responsibility for any conversation squarely on our shoulders, “…for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.5”.
Let us now return to the questions posed at the beginning of this essay.
How do you see yourself?
You see yourself through your actions in the Present, conditioned by memories of the Past.
How do others see you?
Others will see you through your words and actions and in their minds through their memories.
What’s your narrative?
Let’s talk.
Identity is a conversation.
https://victorsimpsonponelis.substack.com/p/us-federalism-is-the-breath-of-our
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/identity
https://victorsimpsonponelis.substack.com/p/monsters-from-the-id
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Galatians%206%3A7&version=KJV