identity for neurodivergents
Who are you at your CORE? Are YOU authentic? what is authenticity?
We’re told that have a core self. We’re told to be ourselves, our authentic selves. In reality, we have a multiplicity of intersecting selves, and how do we know which of these are true?
We have selves of different ages — our 2 year old self, our 14 year old self, ourself at 23, 45, 89. We different parts of our psyches — the shame part, the confident part, the anger, the madness, the defensive, the creative. We have the selves that emerge when we’re with different people — our public selves and our private selves, the self you are with your best friends, your self with your mom or dad or child, or dog; your self with your teachers, or with the neighborhood folks, the people at your work, and the people who are different races, different cultures, different religions than you.
we split off from ourselves
In her work, the psychologist Carol Gilligan found that at a certain age we sacrifice our relationship with ourselves for our relationship with other people. For boys this happens at age 4 or 5 (they are told not to cry, given messages to repress their emotion), and for girls this happens at age 12 or 13 when they are given the message to not feel or be sexual. Therefore we become disconnected from what happens in our bodies, a split occurs between what is happening truly within us, and what we allow ourselves to be aware of and in relationship with.
Some lucky folks, they may be exactly who they are across all conditions. But for others of us, along the way, we’ve learned self-preservation, survival, safety. We’ve learned when it’s okay to let out parts of ourselves and when it’s not okay.
If you’re anything like me, you do it seamlessly, effortlessly, without thinking hard at all about it. I curate my energy less with my best friend than with my friend who has judgments about her neurodivergent family members. But with the latter, I amend myself without realizing it in the moment: deep traces of what to say and what not to say, long seated habitual patterns of movement in my muscle memory take the driver’s seat.
I’m more self-conscious when I’m with people I don’t feel safe with, but it’s an automatic, unconscious process that amounts to stiffening my range of motion, cutting off the depth in which I could reach into.
Though I’ve always considered myself authentic — I am strongly aware of my emotions and typically honor them, and align my actions with them — more recently I am learning that authenticity is much more complicated than I had assumed. I am wondering which parts of myself are my “core” and which parts I may have thought were “authentic” but were adopted as a way to present myself as neurotypical, or shape-shift in some way to feel acceptance and stave off shame.
Identities can be sharply painful. When I’m feeling shame, I begin to hate myself — the self that was insecure or rageful, the self that was not enough or too much. I crumble into regret about whatever harm I’ve caused or embarrassment I’ve brought upon myself. Yet this identity is nowhere near the full truth of who I am.
In these times, it can be mending, it can be medicine, to remember core parts of myself. Re-member literally meaning — to put the body back together.
So to make my true identity intact again, my loved ones can remind me, or I can remind myself: of my particular way of seeing beauty when I was 3, of how I feel deep empathy, of how I seek truth in layers and making all manner of connections to understand the world deeply.
what is to be gained from forgetting ourselves?
At the same time, it can be useful to see through our identities, and know we are more than the ego, (ego here meaning how we organize our sense of self), we are beyond it. Zen Buddhists talk about emptiness and form.
Form are these particular selves that hold emotion and ideas and thoughts and qualities that are personal to us. Emptiness is the fact that all of this is just energy: energy running through our bodies, same as the energy running through the earth, the animals, objects, the sun.
Writing can facilitate a flow experience, total immersion into a task, where the ego melts and you are in connection to a higher self, in open connection to the world, to humanity. In this deep connectedness we can hold lightly our self-conception.
In an interview with Roberta Grant, the writer and Buddhist Pico Iyer says: “I loved the way abyss Fu spoke of…reminding oneself to take nothing personally and nothing too seriously, since that is exactly how I see writing. Everything good in the writing experience seems to come in the process, in the getting lost and in the forgetting of self and purpose.”
The interviewer Roberta Grant, enrolled in Iyer’s writing workshop, experiences how writing with an understanding of how our energies are nothing more than pieces of the energies of the world at large, gives way to self-compassion: “After my experience at Tassajara, I found myself filled with empathy — both for my inner selves and for all beings in the world.”
Thus, surrendering to loss of self, gives way to compassion for ourselves and our multiple identities.
Part of seeing through the self to what lays beyond the self, is paradoxically, is to dig deep into the multiple selves we carry. When we write them we can get closer to what is underneath them, and around them, our core witness that is both of the self and apart from it.
writing the self
Think of a time when you were you felt the most YOU.
What did it feel like? What were you doing? Describe it with attention to your five plus senses: (What did you hear, see, smell, feel, taste, and, what did you feel in your body, in the space around you, in the energy of that moment within yourself or from the energy of those around you).
Think of one of your selves that may also contain a “mask” in some shape or form. What does it feel like in situations when you are that self/wear that mask?
Describe a situation with attention to your five plus senses — (What did you hear, see, smell, feel, taste, and, what did you feel in your body, in the space around you, in the energy of that moment within yourself or from the energy of those around you).
Write your self-identity origin story.
Where did your self conception originate, and how did it get shaped overtime to what it is now?
What are memories of yourself and your self conception, or core identity, that you can hold onto like touchstones, that remind you of pieces of your core self that you hold dear?