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2024-12-29 22:42 EST

I am always of two minds when it comes to identity, really in any respect. I truly believe humans are complex and nebulous and the social borders we create to separate each other are artificial and often harmful and reductive. But, despite this, there's something so endlessly fascinating to me about assigning a value to a person, as though life is a video game and each person is a collection of stats and states.

Maybe I've just patterned my brain too much off of Wikipedia. It's like I want facts to be presented to me in small snippets, the infoboxization of human complexity. Perhaps I am jealous of people that can fit neat and tidy in the boxes made for them by society. I often ask myself questions about my identity that often lead to more questions rather than answers.

As an example: what is your gender? A lot of people have a very easy answer to this. It is as though society presented them with this question and an answer early on, and they haven't varied from it. Or, if they have, they've varied from the answer but not the question. Once you start interrogating the question, it quickly becomes clear that there are base assumptions holding them up that often are not rooted in reality.

Sometimes, it's just a lack of definition ("where are you from?"), but the ones I find more fascinating are those for which history has invented a whole framework to categorize people. Gender fits into this of course, but so does ethnicity, race, religion, sexuality, political ideology, really the whole works.

Time and again I have gotten into a mood where I want to list facts about myself, but in trying to be specific, I end up showing the hand of my composite nature. It is not inaccurate to say that my religion is "Judaism", but saying that reduces the truth. I could get progressively more precise, e.g. "Reconstructionist Judaism", "Raised Lutheran, converted to Reconstructionist Judaism", "member of a Reconstructionist Jewish congregation, converted under the auspices of Conservative Judaism from Missouri Synod Lutheranism", until I am listing the dates and institutional affiliations of key rites as well as my interpretations of holiness.

I feel this should show that I've come back around to supporting my original gut feeling, that boiling down a person to a word or two is absolutely and inevitably reductive. But if only that would do away with the desire to do such a thing...

Tags: identity • society • the self