Who Do I Think I Am?

These past couple of weeks, I've been reflecting on the questions I asked in my last blog post.  And this week, my questions to answer were "What do I treat as my primary identity?  Why?  How does it manifest?"  I knew this series would take a lot of introspection to answer.  Thankfully, an activity in one of my classes jump-started the process for me.

As a "get to know you" exercise, all of us in my Translational Evidence and Theory for Practice class were asked to draw and share a pie chart of who we are.  I'm a pretty visual person, so I liked the concept of the exercise; however, it had a flaw.  It doesn't take having a math degree to know that all the "slices" of the pie chart have to add up to 100% and that there cannot be overlap between said slices.  If you give Jack and Diane two slices of pie, you don't tell Diane that some of Jack's pie is also hers and Jack that some of Diane's pie is also his.  They will give you weird looks and ask why you even gave them separate pieces in the first place.  Anyway, long story short, I couldn't make my pie chart so that different parts of myself overlapped and created it based on the amount of time they take up.


As I was figuring out how exactly I was going to make my drawing, I thought of what would make this better.  What immediately came to mind was a Venn diagram.  This easily addresses the reality that identities overlap and interact.  For example, I can show that my experiences with food have strong ties to my passion for sustainability.  With a Venn diagram, I can map out which parts of myself are more encompassing or more compartmentalized.  Its structure captures the claimed identities (circle labels), their interactions (circle placement), and their relative importance to me (circle size).

Brainstorming this, it seemed so straight-forward.  I knew it would take some thought and time, but it felt really doable.  Actually carrying this out led to some difficulties, though. It is hard to figure out relative importance as you add things one by one to a page by hand.  Trying to figure out degree of overlap also poses a challenge.  I found myself asking questions like "How am I supposed to quantify how much I identify as an older sister relative to how much I identify as a daughter?" and "I know being a sinner technically sits outside of being a daughter of God and a Catholic since sinning means I am rejecting these identities, but shouldn't it also sit inside of that? And how much would that overlap with being Catholic v. being a Christian?  Or how could I reconfigure the circles because that distinction doesn't even make sense here." I also found myself coming back to a statement one of my friends once said - "We are who people think we are."

After he had said that, I automatically replied that I didn't believe that was the case.  But this activity, along with a book I am currently reading, has started to make me consider the importance of other people's perceptions in answering the question, "What do I treat as my primary identity?"  I can sit here all day making circles to try to figure out the answer, but that doesn't mean my answer is recognized by the people around me.  I also need to ask the people in my life what they see as my primary identities to know if how I see myself comes through in my words and actions.  Why I fit into an identity in their eyes also matters.  If I am aware of what they cite, that's validation that I see myself with a decent amount of clarity.  If I didn't consider or disagree with  what they say, it helps to know what they see because that perspective wasn't formed for no reason.  It's through this interaction that I can know how the identities I claim/embody manifest.

At this point in my post, you'd think I would reveal what my Venn diagram ended up looking like and what I figured my primary identity is.  But, that would keep me from being able to actually do what I had just mentioned without bias.  Also, since I took a break from making the Venn diagram to write this, planning on posting it could bias the end result of that process.  You'll have to live with only seeing the revamped copy of my beautiful pie chart. 😉

Comments

  1. In case it matters, I had the thought that it doesn't serve me well to think of "Catholic" and "Christian" as somehow separate, for in reality, they are not. I want to recognize and affirm anything true that someone says or does, even if they are not Catholic. The call to holiness is universal, and so is the receptivity to truth. I can balance the true teaching of the Church with recognizing truth wherever I find it by remembering that the benefits of being a child of the Church have nothing to do with me. Spoken like a true convert, I know. :)

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    1. Yeah, I definitely hear what you're talking about. That is part of the reason why I switched to the Venn Diagram model. The "Catholic bubble" is entirely within my "daughter of God bubble," but I felt the need to have them as their own "bubbles" because of my family background and faith journey. My dad's side is mostly Lutheran and my mom's mostly Catholic, so that lead to an upbringing that looks different from many of the cradle-Catholics I've met. With this and my involvement in a couple different interdenominational ministries, I think about Christian unity/denominations pretty frequently. That's actually the "theme" I'm looking at for this month, so more to come later that elaborates on this topic. :)

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