Who Are You When the Jersey Comes Off?

“So, what do you do?”

It’s the first question at nearly every North American gathering, usually somewhere between the coats coming off and the cheese plate. We ask it the way we ask about the weather: politely, automatically, as though we don’t much care about the answer. Except we do. We’re filing the person. Accountant. Nurse. Retired. Between things (uh-oh). Worst of all, consultant.

I’m told that in parts of Europe this question is considered a little rude, roughly on par with asking to see someone’s bank statement before the drinks arrive. I can’t vouch for every country on the planet, but I like the instinct. It suggests that what you do for money might not be the most interesting thing about you. Possibly not even in the top ten.

Here, in North America, the job is our first line of defence. Ask someone who they are and they’ll tell you what they do. And if it isn’t the job, it’s often something just as external: the team (Leafs fans, I see you, and I’m sorry), the kids (“I’m Emma’s mom”), the church, the flag. None of these are bad things to love, not even rooting for a team that hasn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1967. My worry is what happens when those things become the whole answer.

Because external things have a habit of leaving. The job gets “restructured.” The kids grow up and move out, which, let’s remember, is the entire point of raising them. When your sense of self is bolted to something outside you and that something goes away, you don’t just lose a paycheque or gain an empty bedroom. You lose your answer to “who am I?” That’s when a change becomes a crisis.

I think about it the way I think about websites. If your identity lives on somebody else’s server, you’re one policy change away from a 404. The company decides you’re redundant, the child decides Vancouver looks nice (don’t get me wrong — it really does), and the page you’ve been pointing everyone to for twenty years just… isn’t there anymore. Self-hosting is more work. You have to maintain the thing yourself, apply the patches, keep the lights on. But nobody else gets to pull the plug.

Yeah, yeah, cloud computing. Just roll with it.

Religion and nationality complicate this further, because they rarely come à la carte. Sign up and you get the whole bundle, ideology included, some of which you’d never have chosen on your own. Identify with the bundle hard enough and you can find yourself defending positions that run against who you actually are. Although (and here I may be tying myself in a knot) if you’ve handed your identity over wholesale, was there a “you” in there to betray in the first place? Maybe that’s the real danger. The ideology doesn’t so much overrule your identity as move into the empty room where one should have been.

I digress. Sort of.

For what it’s worth, I like to think I have an identity of my own. Free Thinker at Large. I’m fully aware I might be kidding myself; nobody is an entirely independent variable, and all of us are shaped by the people and accidents around us. But “free thinker” (or freethinker) describes a habit of mind rather than a thing I own, and you can’t be laid off from a habit of mind.

So how do you build an identity that doesn’t come with a removable battery? I suspect that’s the real work of living, the job behind all the jobs. And I suspect a lot of it happens in quiet. This is where something like meditation earns its keep. Strip away the incense and the app subscriptions and what’s left is surprisingly simple: sitting alone with your thoughts long enough to notice which ones are actually yours. You won’t come out with a complete map of yourself. If you’re lucky, you’ll understand yourself a tiny bit better. That’s not nothing.

But, oh, if it were only that simple. Whatever you find in there won’t stay put. A personal identity worth having is fluid; it changes over time, sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. That sounds unsettling if you think of identity as a possession, something to lock in a drawer and check on now and then. It sounds a lot better if you think of it as a direction of travel. Or even no direction. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wandering aimlessly. What matters is learning to be comfortable with that, without mourning every earlier version of yourself you leave behind.

Which may be why I’m so fond of the “at large” part. It’s what we say about someone who hasn’t been caught yet.

I’d like to keep it that way.