Since I last wrote, I have become different things: an employee, a commuter, a long-distance girlfriend, a grocery shopper. And in all of these shifts and transitions, the role of identity and identity politics have been slowly consuming me, both in thought and in behavior.
Transition is usually difficult for people, and I feel like I fall in the normal distribution in my reaction to it. It's exciting, terrifying, unsettling, and slightly disorienting. Each shift dislodges a part of my identity, allows me to examine it more closely and from a different angle, and then provides me with the opportunity to retire it or reactive the identity particle in a different location. This process brings layers into my life and gives me rosy cheeks, but it can be an exhausting endeavor to undertake.
In some ways, the transition process is a microscope into my presentation and understanding of self. Who am I? What elements of my self are unmovable, and what parts should be moved due to a shift in context or condition. And how are these elements determined? On what grounds do they stand? Genetics, social conditioning, context, education, privilege, access to resources, values, relationships, philosophical paradigms, religious beliefs, stereotypes, positive social sanctioning, metatheories, 'unfounded' & unexplainable preference sets? Most likely it is a yes to all of these (I have no idea about the link between genetics and preference formation), which means that a lot of who I am is determined by where I am, and who I am surrounded by. I don't find this to be a 'bad' thing, but a condition of being a human in relationship with the world and other humans.
But I do think there is danger in allowing any of those categories (again, discounting genetics) to become hard and unmovable. This might be seen in a person who has settled into their life, perhaps with a partner and a stable job, where the future could be remarkably orchestrated to reflect their static preferences. Perhaps the shear fact that preferences are a plastic set of characteristics allows people to be infinitely complex, without threatening their humanity or connection to others and society.
I think that this complexity is what drives people to become concrete as they age, and it also drives people to categorize and summarize other people. As people begin to more fully embody their definition of self, the game of identity politic becomes more straight forward and streamlined, both for the individual and the other people who are trying to 'figure them out'.
If I have learned one thing interesting in working with memory studies, it is that there is a good likelihood that people who do not actively learn and entertain abstract ideas have a more difficult time retaining their memory in their old age. The ability of your brain to create new pathways and connections diminishes over time, until you reach a point where no new connects are made and established connections are lost. Maybe the way our memories work is similar to the ways our identities work, as soon as you stop changing and allowing yourself to be complex and abstract, you begin to die.
