Thoughts about Identity

Commuting is wonderful if you're driving through the country. If I end up staying at my present University for too long, I may end up not enjoying my commute as much, as we will inevitably become increasingly suburbanized, even in the semi-rural South. Anyway, what a great opportunity to think. On today's drive, I was trying to understand what my passion is as an academic and an aspiring public intellectual. I realized that I am greatly consumed with questions of identity. I'm sure S.O. and my friends realized this long ago but it's taken me much longer. Isn't that always the way?

...I keep coming back to a few central questions. Who am I? This question, for me, is more about desired or hypothesized qualities than an essential character--when we ask ourselves this question, our answers quickly move away from the social roles that we fill/occupy/inhabit and gravitate toward adjectives. At least for me, they do. Compassionate, loving, strong, etc. Secondarily, I begin to think about roles because once I know what qualities I aspire to or think I have, I can imagine how those qualities play themselves out within the roles I inhabit. There is a temporal aspect of roles and qualities--both may change or be altered over time. The roles I inhabit may change prominence--mother to grandmother, for example. The qualities I aspire to or hypothesize myself as having may live within these roles or change but time is always there wielding influence and shaping our thoughts. There is a final question that seems to me to be important--who is it that I want to become? Do people who don't ask this question miss out on something? In moments of draining domestic activity, I lose sight of this question and feel resigned to being a captive washer-of-the-dishes. I suppose in some way, like Betty Friedan originally suggested. Individuals whose work exists within the home or exists as unvalued service to others (minimum wage earners, child care workers...) and who, to use a bit of Marxist ideology, have been alienated from their work, also may not ask this question or find it relevant. Perhaps it is like my former colleague says...identity is a luxury of the middle class.

Which raises another interesting question. Since I enjoy doing research in urban, poor and minority communities, am I implicitly forcing yet another deficit upon individuals within these communities and reinforcing the idea that "their lives would be better if only they would think more like the middle class? Hmmm....