No person is one thing.
From one context to another, one situation to the next, the ways we interact with other people and the ways we express ourselves can vary dramatically.
- We’re frightened in one scenario. Confident in another.
- We’re infinitely patient when it comes to this – the exact opposite when it comes to that.
- We’re reserved when we’re alone. We open up around other people.
Identity is more malleable than we realise. It’s shaped by context as much as anything else we can point to.
That’s not to say that conditioning doesn’t play a role. It does. And it’s driven by the stimuli we repeatedly subject ourselves to.
Over time, the contexts we’re exposed to begin to shape our default ways of being.
Placed in the same conditions, confronted with the same pressure, we react in predictable ways.
Taken out of those conditions & placed in new ones? The same wiring remains.
We’re not guaranteed to act out the same script, of course. With a different stimulus, the potential for change emerges. But our baseline behaviour can tip one way or the other based on how we got here.
If we’re not careful, it’s easy to take conditioning to heart. To assume that, because we’ve been cast in a particular role, we’re consigned to it. Stuck as we are, with no potential for change.
It’s an understandable perspective. That doesn’t make it a useful one.
Our identity is malleable. We know this – implicitly. We see it in how other people think, act, and behave.
But when it comes to our personal situation, we overidentify with our habits. Our personality traits. Our default responses.
We take all those varying aspects of ourselves as a given…
When, more often than not, they’re taken. Things which we’ve consciously or unconsciously adopted as our own over time – not an inherent, inarguable aspect of our being which we’re welded to.
They’re building blocks. Nothing more, nothing less.
Your identity is nothing more than whatever building blocks you cling most fiercely to.
The more closely we identify with something, the more likely we are to think it’s a part of who we are. But that’s getting it backwards.
These things are apart from you. Not a part of you.
When it’s a part of you, you defend it. You identify with it. You hold onto it.
When it’s apart from you, you hold it at arm’s length. You see it as it is – a separate entity. Something that has come into your awareness, but that’s not intrinsically connected to your character.
When we recognise that character is constructed (piece by piece), we free ourselves to see that structure for what it is:
One configuration among many.
Something we can rebuild, reshape, or reform any way we desire.