You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.
– Alan Watts
My first thought on reading Watt’s words this day was that if the opposite was true – you are obliged to be the same person you were five minutes ago – none of us ever turned into fully functioning adult members of society. We would still not be able to walk. (Not to mention that as it would also be true for our ancestors, they never procreated, and we wouldn’t even be here.) Beware of extreme interpretations.
In her post on LinkedIn, Andee Scarantino advocated for letting go when it is time to let go. Of things, people, projects, jobs…
“Sometimes, we want to continue paying respect to our past. We often believe that if we don’t, it discredits what we’ve done or who we’ve been.”
– Andee Scarantino
In me, her post landed in a place that led to the title of this piece: Identity hoarding.
My thoughts went by the way of letting go of things. A person who is pathologically not able to let go of things will typically get a diagnosis of hoarding disorder. And for my inner eye, I saw a “mind” filled up with nontangible “things”: ideas, projects, to-do lists, places, relationships, dreams, and identities.
A friend had remodeled and had, in the process of packing down a significant number of books, let go of the contents of a bookcase. “Without these books, I am not an academic any longer.” (I silently thanked Providence for having provided me with the www for doing my thesis studies. I just have a gazillion PDF journal articles to delete. Why do they still sit in my laptop decades later?) On setting books back on the shelves, another set of books, previously used for professional purposes, left my friend’s library. “Without these books, I am not… any longer. But then what am I?” I reassured my friend that being a good friend was not an insignificant contribution to the world. But I could so relate to the pain and confusion in the voice.
Recently, another friend, whom I have known for a number of years through my communication training work, wondered what I had done for a living. The question tells you how much previous parts of my life openly inform what I am doing now. At the same time, I wonder whether my ability to draw connections between things that are not usually connected stems from having not been specifically trained in “my field” earlier in my life. I have always worked with some aspect of how people solve problems – the processes – whether from a technological, a financial, an organizational, and now mainly the human-to-human perspective.
Can you read in the previous paragraph how I am not really ready to let go of those earlier parts of my identity? I can.
And frankly, writing this piece is probably the shortest and most concise description of my meandering professional development that I have ever come up with. But would I like to go back and fill similar roles in an organization? Over my dead body.
I think my reluctance to letting go is related to the same conundrum that my friend voiced: “Who am I when I am not my profession?” I will twist the question slightly to “How am I seen by people around me if not through my professional identity?” And I know all too well the answer to that question from experiences during my first years living in the US when I wasn’t allowed to work and thus couldn’t serve some transactional purpose for the one asking what I did for a living: I was somebody you didn’t waste your time on. (I must have been involved with a different kind of people back then.)
Should somebody ask like that today, I might answer that I reteach people the things they learned in preschool: be kind, don’t fight, share, don’t lie, say thank you and please, (and wash your hands when you have used the bathroom.) Several identities ago I was asked whether I was a preschool teacher because I was good at making the questioner’s newborn grandson stop fussing. And back then, in my little competitive ego, I was so offended that anybody would think I focused on something as menial as soft skills. Oh, the irony of that.
Now I will ponder what Andee really meant by “paying respect to our past.” Probably something completely different. I seem to adjust my lens to focus first through my pain points. Wonder about that, too.
Thank you for provoking me, Andee, I gained more clarity for myself. And wasn’t that the main purpose?
“…letting go when it is time to let go”? Who determines when it’s time to let go of our past? What works for one may not work for someone else.
I don’t have the same problem with my bookshelves as the friend you mentioned. I routinely pull books off my shelf that no longer serve me. If I leave them, are they trophies? Or judges? By recycling them, someone else can benefit.
Memories, though, are different—at least for me. I can’t seem to box them up and “let them go.” I worked for the same corporation for almost 45 years, and if I don’t pay my respects to my past, who will? I can, however, shift how I look at the memories. We spend 8, 10, 12 hours a day at work over X years. Again, at least for me, that past defines me to a degree or at least informs me. When asked for a bio on someone else’s podcast or book project, I often begin with “The river that runs through my career…” and then explain the unifying thread. Speaking only for me, if I let go of that thread, did I matter?
It’s a thought-provoking piece, as always, Charlotte.
Thank you for reading and commenting, Jeff, and your comment made me think.
Andee commented whether “my path found me” and I somewhere wrote back that the step from one to the other was natural because there was evidently more to learn about problem-solving. You expression “the river that runs through my career” fits beautifully, because we don’t know which way the water will run until we are there, down river, where we meet the next inflection point.
Letting go of memories might better be an openness to that what remembered perhaps didn’t happen or didn’t happen as we remembered, and there may be other perspectives on an event that we only realize years later once we have been a few times more around the block. I had one of those rewrites yesterday when talking to a friend. My new story may not be true or complete, either, but it gives me an alternative interpretation that will put that memory to rest. And that is a letting go of dead wood.
You’re so welcome for provoking you, my dear friend Charlotte Wittenkamp.
After reading your piece, I think you’re spot on with what I meant. I have based a lot of my career in personal development on “Identity work” and the ways holding identities keeps us stuck in ways that don’t serve us… However your points “who am I if not-” are pertinent and come up often as well.
I had a conversation (not with a client but with someone else) in the last year who was going through a MASSIVE struggle because they retired, so they weren’t (profession) any longer and then, had knee surgery so they couldn’t fall back on their identity of “runner.”
For me, all that (job, sport) is just “stuff.” Shit I do while waiting to die.
But there’s something deeper- Ikigai, purpose, essence,
✨e n e r g y…. ✨ BEing.
I read this line: “I have always worked with some aspect of how people solve problems – the processes – whether from a technological, a financial, an organizational, and now mainly the human-to-human perspective.”
That sounds a lot like those deeper words. So, could you say the degrees, the professions, and the path chose you? You ARE, first. All that came after. And take all that away, you still *are*
Thank you for putting your lovely reply here, Andee, and please see my reply to Jeff’s comment.