When Identity is Threatened
The hard reality of the living world
The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir lived the majority of her life in fear. At a young age she looked at the world and the people around her, and fear began to creep in. She saw people around her as older, and early on made the astute connection that like everyone older than her, she too would age.
And this scared her.
If one were to go through Beauvoir’s work, they would find a common theme, and that is the fear of aging—becoming older—and death.
“Nothing should be more expected than old age,” she once wrote, “nothing is more unforeseen.”
When we are young, we feel vibrant and free, like we can take on the world, like we will hold onto that moment and that freedom for the rest of our lives.
But life doesn’t work that way. As we get older, our bodies and minds begin to shift. We watch as our skin begins to sag, as wrinkles form around our eyes, as our hair turns gray and falls out.
Beauvoir saw this early on and was deathly afraid of it. One can chalk up the fear as being too self absorbed or unrealistic with expectations, even vain. One could think of the ridiculous nature of worrying about looks and aging when there are so many more important things going on in the world.
But the thing is, aging is part of our identity. We tie who we are to certain periods and certain aspects of our lives. We also tie attributes of ourselves to those periods and when they are no more, we feel like we are losing a part of ourselves.
Our identity in some cases literally starts to crumble with time. The vibrancy we once held fades. Our athletic abilities and flexibility diminishes. We remember our youth and see the stark rejection of it.
“There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning—devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.”
While our bodies are not the sole aspect of our identity, they play a huge role within it. When identity is threatened, we tend to reject the truth, we marshal reasons and excuses to fit our own mold for our identity and try to dispel the truth, try and push away reality.
This happens across all forms of our identity: our interests, political affiliations, social identity, our jobs. Rather than accept reality, our mind works to tell us a story to avoid the hard truths.
We combat this through having accountability partners, people we respect and trust, people who will be honest with us. We also can take a hard look in the mirror and remind ourselves of the truth, question reality and make a promise to ourselves to seek the truth, even if it is a harder reality to swallow.
No matter what, everyone’s identity will be threatened at some point—we could lose the job that defined us, could watch our political party lose an election, we could lose our partner, someone who was the other half of our identity, and be lost. All of this is a natural part of growth, of developing, and of being a part of this world. The key to dealing with threatened identities is not to reject them outright, rather, learn to see the truth in it.
From the truth we will come to see reality. And there is solace, even when hard, in that.
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo