Life in a box... identity crisis

What is your identity? What do you identify as? Is that a strange question? No, I’m not asking how you identify sexually although I guess that could be answer. I’m asking how you identify to yourself when you look in the mirror. Let me explain.

I’ll begin by telling you a story, a story about a man who has had an identity crisis as of late. To do that I need to roll back the clock a few decades. (Ugh! that’s sound bad)

Let’s start back when I began to consider myself an adult, around 18. I moved out of my fathers home and was off on a journey in life to be my own person. I identified as self sufficient, as a self taught chef, and as a man. I was living with my girlfriend from high school and I was young and thought I knew what I was doing and to an extent I did but I was still learning. Then my best friend at the time passed away, I separated my girlfriend at the time and that led me to a church. That’s when I added a layer to my identity as a Christian. A short time later I added another layer to my identity and that layer was a Soldier. So, here I was at age 20 almost 21 and my identity was what I thought solid, little did I know I would soon add another layer. This layer would be a very complicated layer of identity and could be a post all on its own but that layer was father. (I’ll get to that one day)

Not long after I would add a crucial layer to my identity, it too was another complicated and complex layer to my life called husband. That layer led to father again, and finally an additional layer that was to be my career. Woven into the fabric of these layers were smaller identities like over achiever, perfectionist, and as I grew to have a love/hate relationship for fitness a layer of healthy. These layers define us as humans when we describe ourself to another person. They are things we put on a resume, Social media profiles, dating profiles, and in conversations. Sometimes they become our identity for the majority of our life, if not the rest of our life. Some layers and identities just go away naturally and were temporary to begin with, like Soldier, my time had been served.

Then! Sometimes life has other plans...

In 2018 life, God, fate, whatever you want to call it decided it was going to chip away at my identity. It started with my health, vertebral arterial dissection is what it’s called. I woke up one morning In February unable to formulate sentences, unable to swallow, unable to feel anything on the right side of my body, etc. as I sat there across from my daughter confused, life would never be the same. Life had decided to chip away and remove my identity as healthy. Then one day in rehab after I fully understood what had happened and the lifelong effects, life decided to take away another layer called overachiever and perfectionist. My brain and body would never function the same, I had to learn to do things over again that I took for granted. Simple things, like swallow.

Then I was faced with another identity crisis, husband. This one both life and I decided to chip that layer away. This was a tough one because it had been my identity for most of my adult life. Divorced, single father has a stigma to it. Your judged (surprisingly) by the people you expect to be the least judge-mental. Christians tend to judge us by this identity in our life. This all lead to an identity crisis of faith for me. I couldn’t understand why these layers were being peeled away, why was my Identity for so long becoming less and less of what it had been before? Well just leave that layer over here in limbo for now.

Then March 2020 came along.... ugh... another layer was about to be stripped away. This layer was crucial to my identity. My career defined me as a person outside of being a father. It was who I was day in and day out, it was one of the only identities I had left, its what fed my ego and my drive to be the best. It’s what fed my identity as an overachiever, something I was trying to regain back from when I had lost it.

So, where does that leave me? What is my identity now? I will always be a father, which I am very proud of and I would gladly let that be my only identity if it had to be. As I enter this new phase of life I can choose to look at It from 2 different perspectives:

1. Life stole my identity, I quit.

2. Life gave me a chance to redefine my identity, a chance to be better.

Life has given me a chance to step back, evaluate, and to create a new identity. An identity that I can mold and I can create with new layers, better layers, and layers that will define me in my future. So, here’s to those of us who choose option number 2! Who will not allow our broken identities to define us and keep us from becoming who we want to be. Here’s to new life - Vita Nova.