Meanings of Identity

I was thinking that identity is related to pain, in the sense that when I hurt I know that I'm real, and that I'm really me. Now, reading Dorothy Wall's book Encounters with the Invisible, on her experience of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I think of a different meaning of identity. She writes about 'passing' for a healthy person, when really she is ill - both in her own mind, for many years, and then when her body denied her that pretense at least during those times when she went out into the world. Experiencing her pain internally, she refused to identify externally with an image of pain and illness. Her picture on the dust jacket, taken perhaps during this illness, shows a friendly, lively woman smiling engagingly at the camera from behind her large glasses. Yet she was exhausted, in pain, and had to rest for weeks after a walk in the park or a visit to the acupuncturist. This brings to mind at least two meanings of identity, how I see myself, and how I present myself to others. Then also, is it how I see myself (implying a mirror or a camera, a disembodied eye) or how I feel myself to be from the inside?

My experience is that there is a secret community of those in pain. When I twisted my knee dancing and then took a bus along Mission Street, a black homeless woman saw me standing and offered me her seat as she was getting off at the next stop. I don't know how she knew I was in pain because my sprain bandage was hidden under my pants and I was trying to look and feel normal. Another time, I was suffering from the pain of gallstones while shopping at the Farmers' Market, and the vendors at the fish stall looked right through me as though I wasn't there, moving on to the next person in the line. When there was nobody else waiting, I finally caught their attention, and they sold me a piece of fish without ever making eye-contact. On the other hand, the man in a wheelchair looked up at me and smiled, and the saxophone player playing blues on his saxophone held my gaze for a moment and nodded. I felt like one of the dead, in the story Where the Dead Live by Will Self. In this story, the author suddenly notices that his mother who has been dead for many years is actually still walking the streets and she tells him that when you die you simply go to live in another part of London. But maybe I'm not as good at hiding my pain as those who experience this more of the time.

So identity is how I present myself to the world, how I see myself, and how I feel on the inside. In math, identity means more than just equality. It is symbolized by equal with an extra, third parallel line, and signifies two quantities which are always equal, not just arbitrarily so in the present context. There are many circumstances in which how I see myself is not identical to how I present myself to the world, and then there is also how the world sees me, that can cause a re-interpretation of me to myself. I am thinking of my friend who had a Lithium atom tattooed on his wrist, expressing his identity as a nuclear physicist, only to discover it contains a star of David which has a whole different set of meanings, and is used as a symbol of identity by people with bipolar disorder because Lithium is often used as a medication in that condition. I might have my identity indelibly carved on my body, only to find out that other people see it differently from my intention. Bodily sensations such as pain, even the sensation of having a tattoo or piercing, are unquestionable, unlike all these images and how they are seen. Maybe I mean something deeper than identity is bound up with pain, a felt sense of who I really am.

Why is it so easy to spend 40 minutes fussing around on facebook as I just did, before I started writing this? Probably because of the limitless play around identity and its representation or misrepresentation. I listed myself as no longer single and a couple of friends sent me their cheery regards. When really I am still single, just no longer listed as such, taking a break from dating. And for some reason, I felt a need to take the trouble to correct them... Plus I invited my friend to play chess. Maybe he will ignore my request, that would probably be best for both of us.