Standing outside my son’s elementary school, waiting for him to emerge, I look around at the other parents. We’re in our thirties or early forties, serious expressions on our faces, shivering in the cold, making small talk or staring at our phones. I wonder how many others, like me, are thinking about their own elementary school experiences. We have memories of what it’s like to be five or eight or ten. We remember our favorite teacher, the kids who were kind or cruel, the time we threw up all over our snowsuit or wet our pants, or got on the wrong bus. We remember the joy of a snow day and the anxiety of making friends. It all comes back in a whoosh of recollection.
Suddenly, the children spilling out of the school aren’t just kids. They are us. We are them. Our timelines have converged here, where our early memories are crystalized and our identities formed. In no time at all, our children will be standing on another sidewalk, waiting for their own children to exit a school. I wonder if they’ll see themselves in their children. Will they see us in themselves?
“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be.”
— Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet
As we age, we continue to grow into more of ourselves, evolving and changing, but hopefully becoming truer versions of ourselves. There’s something very comforting and grounding to realize that as the years go by, I carry every version of myself within me. Like a Matryoshka doll of identity, one self inside the other. All contained in a multi-layered being. Some selves or past experiences we’d rather forget, but we wouldn’t be who we are now if we hadn’t been who we were then.
In an age of personality tests and identity labels and a culture of oversharing in public, a kind of identity splitting can happen. Sometimes one can feel an uncomfortable dissonance between the person you really are and the person others perceive you to be. This can be especially jarring when emerging from a life changing event, such as a cross-cultural immersive experience, death of a loved one, a challenging diagnosis, becoming a parent, or living through a global pandemic. Even the simple, universal experience of coming-of-age or launching into adulthood can have a natural splitting effect, where you feel out of place or different around social groups or family systems that knew you best during a particular time of life.
When our inner self stops matching our projected self, it can feel uncomfortable at first. Sometimes it can even lead to an identity crisis.
Identity crises are all part of what it means to be human. They are natural turning points in psychological development. They aren’t all bad—in fact, change can be good! I love this explanation from Psych Central:
“An identity crisis is when you aren’t sure if who you are aligns with who you thought you were.
While it can be a time of challenging thoughts and emotions, an identity crisis can also be a time of positive personal growth and change.”
What if we approached our new, becoming self with curiosity and grace, instead of suspicion or panic? What if we assumed good intent for ourselves and developed an internal knowing that we’re doing the best we can.
In times of personal growth, whether that’s gradual change or dramatic shifts in how we perceive the world, we have an opportunity to greet our future self with the same awe and gentleness that we extend to our past selves. Who is this glorious person I am becoming?
Maybe, like a sudden awareness of being simultaneously a child and an adult in parallel timelines, we can be intentionally mindful of our parallel selves. Maybe it’s not so much a splitting or a divergence from who we are, but an added layer. Like Madeleine L’Engle so profoundly points out, you are every age you ever were. We can take comfort in the fact that our former self isn’t totally gone. She’s still there, another layer of the wholeness of what it means to be.
No matter how much you grow and change, you’re still you.
—NK
Going Deeper
On Identity Crises:
Psych Central—Identity Crisis: Signs, Causes, and How to Cope
Books:
IRL: Finding Our Real Selves in a Digital World by Chris Stedman (get the paperback version, the new introduction is a great addition!)
A Circle of Quiet by Madeleine L’Engle
Podcast episodes:
Going Solo, Finding Yourself, and Keeping Hope Alive: Jen’s Thoughts on 2022 (For the Love with Jen Hatmaker Podcast, December 2022)
Brené and Ashley on LIVING BIG, Part 1 of 2 (Unlocking Us with Brené Brown, December 2022)
All the Ages You've Ever Been
You bring to mind for me Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s poem, Who am I?