Our identities are the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are. Stories like, “I’m a good dancer”, “I’m a feminist”, “I’m a nice guy”, “I’m smart”, or “I’m Matt Damon”. These stories are always informative, but rarely accurate.
For example, here is an actual bio line I’ve used over the years on resumes, websites, grant applications, and Grindr dates:
“A.J. Bond is an award-winning filmmaker and storyteller with a background in acting and a bold sense of design.”
This is supposedly my “identity” as distilled into one pithy sentence. Is it true? Technically, yes. But if we break it down, it actually says very little of consequence, while at the same time revealing a lot more than I intended.
First of all, we have my name, of course. The hero of the one sentence story of my life who has supposedly achieved a series of astonishing feats, including “filmmaking”, “storytelling”, and “acting”. We also have the vivid descriptors “award-winning” and “bold”. And… that’s it. That’s my story, apparently.
Perhaps the most conspicuous part of this story is all the things that it doesn’t say. It doesn’t mention anything about all the other jobs I’ve had over the years to get by, like editing, reality TV, advertising, teaching, ghostwriting, and dinner theatre. None of which sound quite as cool. It also makes no mention of arguably the most important aspects of my life, like my family, my friends, my non-professional passions, my love life, my sexuality, and my personal philosophies or ideologies.
That said, you can certainly read between the lines to determine some of my values. I obviously think that awards are a sign of success. I clearly want to look like I have high profile professional achievements while at the same time communicating that I am creative or artistic. And apparently, I think having a “bold sense of design” is somehow impressive, which is probably just a euphuism for “I’m unique” (or maybe it’s a way to subtly announce my sexuality after all).
So really, the Cole’s Notes version of my bio would go something like this:
“A.J. Bond is a successful, high profile professional who is artistic, unique (and possibly gay).”
The truth is, this bio is no more indicative of who I am than the Christmas list I mailed to Santa when I was 7. Clearly what I thought of as my “identity” is little more than a wish list. It is the four things I desperately want you to think I am: successful, high profile, artistic, and unique. My “identity” isn’t real so much as aspirational.
Buddhists have been arguing for years that not only are our identities not real, but we don’t even have a “self” as such. I didn’t really understand this until I became obsessed with shame (as you do). As an exercise, I recently tried listing all of the situations that commonly trigger shame for me. I was surprised to discover the list was dominated almost entirely by events that threaten my so-called “identity”. For example, when my identity was strongly tied to being a “successful Canadian filmmaker” (perhaps an oxymoron to begin with), anytime someone else in my orbit had substantial film success, I would feel shame. Which is a pretty shitty way to react when your friend just got into Sundance or propositioned by a Weinstein.
But after I had what I call my “shame breakthrough” (which I talk more about here), I realized that my identification as a filmmaker was arbitrary and didn’t actually define me. Almost overnight other people’s film success brought out less and less shame and envy in me (ah, so this is what it feels like to be legitimately happy for your friends!). Conversely, however, and not unironically, my shame breakthrough fed into a new identity that I was now a self-styled shame expert. Suddenly, anytime someone else in my orbit knew more about shame than I did — you guessed it — I felt more shame. I even started to feel competitive towards my own shame idol, the one and only researcher, author, and speaker extraordinaire Brené Brown. Sacrilege! Around this point my bio might go something like:
“A.J. Bond is a shame breakthrusiast and self-help idiot savant (who thinks he knows more than people with actual degrees ‘n’ shit).”
The speed and force with which my ego capitalized on the healthy success of my shame breakthrough and valourized it in a kind of identity press release was nothing short of astonishing, disheartening, and completely at odds with what I learned from the breakthrough itself. Thanks ego! You’re welcome A.J. (said in the voice of Gollum from Lord of the Rings).
In this way, my identity appears to be nothing more than a construct of my ego, built expressly to ensure that I fulfill the arbitrary values I subconsciously think I need to be a worthwhile human being. For example, it’s clear that my ego desperately values uniqueness, and so it gets threatened anytime someone appears to infringe on my unique skills or ambitions, for fear that they will eclipse my identity entirely. I think the logic of my ego is, why would anyone love me if they can love another person who does “me” better than I do?
If, however, I could truly accept that my identity isn’t real and just sort of “let it go” (Frozen style), then I would be dramatically less susceptible to shame. But my ego doesn’t like this idea at all because my ego is afraid of everything, all the time, forever (just like yours). It feels vulnerable being left with no identity to cling to, no statement of personal value to prop you up, no security blanket of worth, nothing “special” or “extraordinary” to justify your existence or lovability. I think this is what the Buddhists mean when they talk about “groundlessness”, existing in a state where you don’t have any real bearings, security, or certainty. In short, existing in reality. Without a concrete identity, it sort of feels like you are nobody, or perhaps even worse, anybody.
In a fiercely individualistic culture like ours, one that rewards personal achievement above all else, getting lost in “the masses” is arguably a greater existential threat than not actually existing at all. The implication is that by being alive you have potential. But if you don’t define yourself or “make a name” for yourself or stand out from the masses in some way, then you must be “squandering” that potential. Which is almost like not existing, except unlike people who actually don’t exist, it’s “all your fault”. This is a fallacy, of course. It’s the irrational fear of being exactly what we really are — one of 8 billion. This is probably why the assimilation-happy aliens from Star Trek, known as The Borg, are always depicted as the bad guys. No one wants to be just another person, we all want to be so-and-so who did such-and-such.
And so our identities are kind of like the psychological equivalent of dogs pissing to mark their territory. We create arbitrary boundaries between “me” and “you” by listing all of the things we think make us unique and therefore uniquely worthy of love and respect. But reality doesn’t always play along with these tall tales, and so we suffer trying to bend ourselves and our worlds to make the illusion of our identity stick. All for fear of accepting the fact that there just isn’t as much to “us” as we thought there was. In this way, our identities are a misguided protective illusion, like bike helmets and airport security. In fact, maybe being a nameless member of The Borg wouldn’t be so bad after all?
Getting Discomfortable with Self-Awareness
In a spirit of embracing the Buddhist concept of “groundlessness”, I have been attempting not to identify so much with my identity. Through meditation, I have started to view my mind more as a thinking machine rather than my “self”. Instead, I am trying to align myself with the silent presence behind my thoughts. Or to paraphrase Run the Jewels in the form of a bio:
“A.J. Bond is the man behind the man behind the man behind the throne.”
But the catch is, one of the aspects of my so-called “identity” that I value the most is my self-awareness. It really does seem to improve my life to understand who I am and why I do the things I do. But can you have no identity and still be self-aware? Is that a contradiction? Or is there a difference between “identity” and “self”?
As much as our identities really do seem to be a bunch of wishful thinking, there clearly are some consistent feelings, impulses, and patterns of behaviour to be observed within each of us. In my experience, these psychological impulses appear to be much more than the resume of self-worth we call “identity”. It’s clear that my psychological impulses are a real and significant part of what makes me me. Thinking about these impulses is very useful and insightful, in fact, that is basically what I would call “self-awareness”.
Here are some concrete examples of repeatable psychological impulses that are true of my “self”. I’ve used my trusty thinking machine to observe that for some reason I can’t order the same meal at a restaurant as my dinner date. And I feel guilty whenever I go through customs even when I have nothing to hide (which is always, I swear! But why would anyone believe me? Alright, just take me to jail…). I would argue that both of these psychological impulses are actually indirectly linked to my favourite emotion: shame. I’ve noticed that this feeling, shame, is itself based on a consistent set of values that are obviously strongly ingrained somewhere in my thinking machine. Values that I must have unconsciously inherited from my culture or my family. Often they are dubious values like “fame”, “uniqueness”, and “never Super Like someone on Tinder”. And these values, coupled with other dogmatic beliefs and emotions, consistently lead to predictable behaviours.
The value of “uniqueness”, for example, trickles down into even the most inane and inconsequential actions, like insisting on ordering last at a restaurant so I can have a different meal than everybody else. Taken altogether, these psychological impulses feel like the real, concrete traits that make up “me” (for better or worse). With this in mind, let’s take another bio break:
“A.J. Bond is driven to pursue high profile artistic achievements, success, and uniqueness in order to combat soul-crushing shame (probably stemming from his sexuality).”
It appears that my true “self” is thus a collection of deeply ingrained psychological impulses and values that control me subconsciously. So I guess the “self” actually is real after all. But that doesn’t mean it’s permanent.
After having my aforementioned “shame breakthrough”, I now believe that we have the power to change our psychological impulses and choose our own values instead. I think the fact that I believe we can change at all is similar to what Buddhists mean when they argue we don’t have a self. Buddhists are simply removing the past and future from the equation (as they are always want to do), so our psychological impulses seem fresh every time. The benefit of this view is that if we don’t identify ourselves with our impulses from the past or project those impulses into the future, we are probably in a much better psychological position to act differently.
But unless you were born into Buddhism or trained to meditate from a very young age, by the time you discover this wisdom your psychological impulses are probably so strongly ingrained and well formed, like your favourite pair of skinny jeans, that you can’t just whip them off and give them to the proverbial Salvation Army (which, by the way, is a notoriously homophobic organization, so you probably don’t want to give them your jeans anyway, or your old values for that matter). Like any good pair of jeans, your psychological impulses are so snug that it’s going to take a lot of yanking to get them off.
One type of yanking is through meditation. As I’ve learned it, meditation allows me to practice not thinking. Living in a more “mindful” way day-to-day, free from distracting chatter and useless X-Men trivia in my mind, actually helps me to spot these ingrained impulses as they are controlling me. But rather than simply dismissing them as transient illusions of my past self, I think these legacy impulses actually need to be systematically confronted as the formidable foes that they really are (you know, like The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants from the X-Men). Because if we don’t intentionally counteract our ingrained values, anytime we slip out of mindfulness we are in danger of falling right back into our shitty old behaviour patterns (like donating to the Salvation Army).
Another way to yank at your psychological impulses is by exploring altered mind states that actually induce literal “ego loss”. Admittedly, this usually comes about with the help of hallucinogenics, inducing a kind of right brain nirvana in which you feel “one with the universe”, rapturously connected to everyone and everything, kind of like The Borg except happier. However, this seemingly enlightened form of consciousness still does not negate the existence of the very real psychological impulses lurking somewhere in the back of your mind. Because no matter how blissed out you get they always seem to come creeping back when the drugs wear off.
So once again, I don’t think you can just permanently cast off your ego wholesale and start again. Nor would complete ego loss necessarily be a viable way to live day-to-day (despite our parents’ best efforts in the 1970s). Instead, I think we all need to take responsibility for our “selves” and do the dirty work of reaching into our subconscious (not unlike reaching into a garbage disposal unit) and examining each and every impulse we find in order to decide if we actually want to keep them.
In the end, while your conscious “identity” is not so real, I think your unconscious “self” really is. We are full of entrenched values, dogmatic beliefs, thought patterns, and emotional reflexes built up from the past. These psychological impulses are more “us” than any bio we can possibly write and we ignore them at our peril.
But the good news is, I think through meditation and self-awareness, we can find our unconscious impulses and make them conscious in order to change them, and ourselves, for the better. We can wrestle with each and every dogmatic subconscious impulse and counteract it with a healthy value of our choice. By acknowledging who we really are underneath, we can start to become who we actually want to be.
It’s not going to be easy, but through mindful self-awareness and a whole lot of practice I can learn to recognize each and every impulse I feel for “uniqueness” and consciously offset it with a new value of, say, equality instead. And so my new bio would go something this:
“A.J. Bond is Borg.”
Getting Discomfortable with Homework
Take a look at the pillars of your own identity. What would you describe about yourself (or indirectly imply) in a bio, book sleeve, job interview, or date with an attractive stranger?
