The Way In Which One Puts Oneself Together
In The Cross of Redemption, James Baldwin defines identity as “the way in which one puts oneself together.” As we move through life, he writes, we haphazardly cobble together an identity, piece by piece, and then at some point, we forget that we did this. We forget that the categories, labels, titles, and roles we come to identify with were haphazardly assembled over time. We come to think of the terms by which we understand and describe ourselves not as invented or improvised, but as innate and definitive. As if it could not be any other way. “But the terms that you have invented, which you think describe and define you,” Baldwin writes, are not permanent or final. The way in which you put yourself together can be rearranged, revised, or remade entirely—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Give Up The Neurotic And Debilitating Journey of Self-Discovery
In June 2023, the musician Nick Cave received a letter from a woman named Kellie, who introduced herself by saying, “I don’t know who I am.” Her childhood, she elaborated, had been spent molding herself to whatever others needed or expected of her. Her father was a “sad and angry man,” hardened by his own difficult childhood. She assumed the role of her mother’s protector, and felt she had therefore “never developed properly as an adult.” Deep down, she harbored artistic aspirations. She felt like she had so much to offer the world, but she had no idea where to even begin. “I guess I’m asking,” she wrote, “how I can find my own identity.” “Dear Kellie,” Cave replied, “You don’t need to know who you are to become an artist. Art moulds us into the shape it wants us to be and the thing that serves it best.” Your identity, he wrote, is not something you find or go searching for, but something shaped through what you dedicate yourself to day after day. “We must cease to concern ourselves with our unique suffering—whether we are happy or sad, fortunate or unfortunate, good or bad—and give up our neurotic and debilitating journeys of self-discovery.” Instead, “if you want to create, sit down, lower your head in deference to the task ahead and get to work…One day you will be laboring away, lost in the flow, a glorious and unfathomable thing unfolding before your eyes, and art will suddenly and outrageously turn to you [and] say, ‘Look. Look who you are. You are an artist.’”
People Mistake Self-Exploration As Self-Expression
Throughout his career, Andre Agassi was somewhat infamous for changing his look. He wore neon one tournament and denim the next. He cycled through wild haircuts, earrings, and headbands. Sportswriters wrote about it constantly, again and again dismissing him as flashy, vain, cocky, too self-assured, too full of himself. Agassi struggled with this ridicule for years, partly because he himself didn’t fully understand what he was doing. He was changing all the time. He was trying on different looks, different attitudes, different versions of himself. But it wasn’t because he was self-assured. It was because he wasn’t, as a friend eventually helped him realize: “He says people have been fooled by my changing looks, my clothes and hair, into thinking that I know who I am,” Agassi wrote. “People see my self-exploration as self-expression.” “I think people make this mistake all the time with other people,” he added, “treating them as finished products when in fact they’re in process.”
A Certain Kind of Personality
At some point in grade school, Greta Gerwig began to think that she might want to be a movie director. But as she became aware of a certain identity often associated with great directors—rebellious, forceful personalities, singularly obsessed with movies from an early age—Gerwig began to doubt whether she had the right kind of personality to become one. When she was a kid in Sacramento, she barely watched movies. At school, she was “a real rule follower.” Throughout her teens, she was interested in so many things—trumpet, ballet, fencing, step aerobics, tap dancing, and on and on—that a ballet instructor told her, “You’ll never be a master of anything. You’ll be a dabbler.” “If you hear a certain criticism at a certain point in your life,” she said, “it sticks with you.” That criticism reinforced her own lingering doubts, and for nearly seventeen years, Gerwig held off on trying to become a director. “I thought that directors had a certain kind of personality and that’s what made them directors,” she said. Eventually, as I wrote about in more detail here, she went for it. She’s directed three movies so far: Lady Bird (for which she became the fifth woman ever to be nominated for Best Director), Little Women, and Barbie (the first solo female-directed film to gross over $1 billion). And in the process, she discovered that she had it backwards: “I realized that it’s doing the work of making movies that gives you that personality.”
And What Comes Out Are These Beautiful Rocks
Growing up, Steve Jobs sometimes mowed the lawn for an elderly man who lived down the street. One day, Jobs said, “He said, ‘Come on into my garage, I want to show you something.’ And he pulled out this dusty, old rock tumbler.” It was a homemade contraption, built from a coffee can, a salvaged motor, and a thick rubber band. They tossed in some “old, ugly rocks,” a bit of grit powder, and some liquid, then sealed the can and started the motor. The can began to spin, “making a racket as the stones went around,” Jobs said, “and he said, ‘Come back tomorrow.’” The next day, “we opened the can, and we took these amazingly beautiful, polished rocks. The same common stones that had gone in—through rubbing against each other, creating a little bit of friction, creating a little bit of noise—had come out these beautiful, polished rocks,” Jobs said. “And that’s always been, in my mind, my metaphor for a team working really hard to make great products: it’s through a group of people bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together—they polish each other, and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful rocks.” In my mind, it’s a good metaphor for individuals as well: it’s by getting to work, as Cave said, by laboring away through uncertainty and doubt, through friction and noise, that all that work eventually turns back to you and says, “Look. Look who you are.”
Harvesting Your Identity
“You are harvesting your identity in whatever it is you’re dedicating yourself to in the hours of the day,” as the poet David Whyte put it. “It’s like practicing.” If you were to practice an instrument for 8, 9, 10, 11 hours a day, even if you had little natural ability, you would become incredibly good at the clarinet, the piano, the saxophone. “So you’re becoming incredibly good at whoever you’re practicing at being in the hours of the day,” Whyte continues. “[Ask yourself], by the way I am in my every day, who am I practicing at becoming? Do I actually want to become that person?” Is this how I want to put myself together? Or do I want to begin rearranging, revising, or remaking myself?