The prison of identity

A heartfelt corrective

Wait! Just Listen is a weekly Sunday newsletter on living a purposeful and meaningful life, in a digitised world of opinion polarisation, gratuitous commentary and click-bait. Subscribe with one-click to receive my musings right in your inbox. If you want access to topics and recordings more attuned to the craft of writing and ideation, do consider opting for the paid version of this newsletter.

---

By: Charles Sabourin

Today’s essay takes a less poetic and more gritty look into our existential negotiation with life and its ceaseless obsession with labels and identities.

When I first made the decision over 8 years ago to embark on a 4-year long PhD in political science, I did so with an agenda. Unlike most of my peers who were hardcore political junkies frothing at every opportunity to work in the boiler room of politics and policymaking, my objectives were far less lofty. I simply wanted to understand how identities shape what it means to be human - a loaded question that plagued my hybridised upbringing as someone of Indian origin living in the multi-cultural potpourri that is Singapore.

In many ways, I wanted to sit with my seething cauldron of deep disappointment at how cultural and social institutions have a way of subtly anonymising the individual self, imposing cookie-cutter renditions of who we ought to be. I couldn’t quite accept this phenomenon of the habitual ways in which we hold ourselves captive and relinquish our own freedoms. What is behind this perilous and prevalent attitude that demands of us to declare our identity along a single dimension? When all of our external conditions are stripped away, be they fortuitous or wretched, who are we in our innermost personhood? What erects the geometry of the “I”?

Turns out that life had all the answers and I didn’t need a 100,000 word thesis to answer my questions. But either way, I came to the sobering conclusion that identities subject us to a form of ritualistic enslavement so insidious that it’s barely noticeable.

While they can proffer an immediate sense of purpose and meaning, identities take away the freedom to choose ones’ attitude in any given circumstance. In its most brutal expression, identities (those that are assigned to us or those that we assume) violate our right to agency. They fragment the essential wholeness of our personhood.

Yet our very existence is validated only through the prism of identity. It is not something we can easily shed. Identities have become the mandated sine qua non through which nations, societies and economies justify their relevance and purpose.

How does one straddle across this unnerving paradox?

For me, loosening the shackles of identity involved accepting that all labels are inherently pathological maladies of the mind. One route to realising this is to magnify our basic tendencies to extraordinary extremes by asking ourselves what motivations drive our food choices, people we meet, jobs we undertake and how we love. These questions offer a singular lens on how the ordinary mind works providing us with uncommon insight into the universals of human nature.

It should soon emerge that identity does not come from a single wellspring but from multiple ones that bear a messy patchwork of personal circumstances and historical contexts giving rise to a unique and unparalleled individual.

I’d like to think that, embedded deep within each of us, is a passionate voice of protest, denouncing the inherent and obsessive delimitation of origin and belief; forces that eventually drift towards biased judgmentalism and indiscriminate prejudice. History has unearthed several heart-wrenching precedents that I’ll avoid going into detail here.

Ultimately living life is about being human.

As humans we have an obligation to realise that there’s only one humanity. Each of us have an obligation to aspire towards a not too distant future where human dignity, plural fraternity and diversity will co-exist overshadowing hatred, violence and racial segregation. We will as a human species be able to stand strong against forces that compel us into being an undistinguishable herd of narcotised clones. We will work hard to conserve our respective idiosyncrasies rather than hide from them, realising that this is our undeniable responsibility.

You see, to be ourselves, we must first possess ourselves and our life-stories.

We must curate the experiential snippets of life, absorb the inner drama and fully embrace and listen to it. And we can only do this through the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we really are, detached from pressures to conform and appease. This is why we write. We wince at mantras about listening and speaking to our inner-selves as the stuff of misguided mystics or, worse yet, motivational speakers. And yet hardly anyone with even the slightest semblance of aspiration toward happiness can deny the existence of this delicately sensitive, stubbornly resilient core of our humanity.

It is nigh time we stop masking ourselves in identities that are not our own even if it involves a dissolving and shaking of our ego. In the same vein, discovering ourselves does not mean scrambling toward some elusive prize just beyond reach. It requires accepting the treasure of the true self you already possess; the true self within every human being that is the seed of authentic personhood.

If anything, I hope this essay serves as a passionate admonition against buying into the myth that an identity is something bestowed upon us by an external force, some booming voice outside ourselves that does the “calling.” Because it is indeed tragic and depressing to forgo who we are whilst hunkering down in a psychological foxhole, clinging onto ordered labels and categories for that dose of self-validation.

Let us celebrate with grace and aplomb our mosaic of experiences that together consolidate the beaming miracle that is each of us. Let us thrive in our highest mode of being, beyond the ego’s ambitions and preoccupations. Let us demolish the prison of identity.