Consider for a moment that identity shapeshifts, and has little to do with who you are. It seems counterintuitive to our colloquial use of identity, which suggests a relatively static human ontology. This static part of ourselves is further validated through identity documents like a passport, or a fingerprint. Though none of these identity artifacts remain as any conventional method with which my friends, family or I identify.

Over the last several years I have been a vagrant; transient and unsettled. I had just moved to Tasmania from Melbourne and after a week the pandemic became an official global code red. When the borders began to shut down, I had to make my way back to my native city of Vancouver. The move was unwelcomed; I grieved for months afterwards having been forced to leave ‘my real home’. All that I had come to identify with was now a gruelling 24-hour flight away; locked behind closed borders.

My physical location in time and space wasn’t the only part of me in flux. In a short span of time I went from marketing student, to software product manager for a tech start-up, to being a serial monogamous, to being 27 and single for the first time since I was a teen, to being unemployed and homeless, to mopping floors for cafes, to being a respected specialty coffee barista, all the while moving between various cities.

Now I find myself as a newly admitted Cognitive Science student living in Toronto. Luckily, I have recently moved in with someone who enjoys candid table talk just as much as I do. We have been speaking a lot about identity; he said to me that to speak of one’s identity is to speak of something other than yourself. This is backed etymologically where identity spawns from the Latin word idem meaning ‘same’.

He himself has an interesting story that has impacted me quite significantly, as it is so different from my own. He has been living in Toronto for two years, after leaving his home city of Beirut. As I wander around the globe looking for my little corner where I feel most like ‘myself’, he has been moving around trying to free himself of the imposed baggage that comes with having a Syrian passport. He was born in Lebanon to a single mother as his father left before he was born. When he was born women could not legally give citizenship, and so his mother had to find someone to marry only so that her son could be a legitimate person. The chosen man happened to be from Syria, but really they could have been from anywhere. A significant part of how my housemate is now identified is really due to chance.

He eventually left his home as corruption and war tore apart his surroundings, leaving behind the victims of state crimes. While his social reality, and personal reality, endured a consistent state of conflict, he found motivation in the parts of his life that he could control. He made sure to do well in school, landing himself in a university that gave him an internationally recognized degree, so that he could do his masters someplace outside of Lebanon. As an outsider listening to his stories, I see just how much of his identity is shaped by the political reality of Lebanon, colonialism, and his own motivation to escape that reality.

I am telling you a story about how both of our present identities came to be, but even my own account remains limited. Even if I were to write a tome detailing how our identities have been constructed, it would remain reductionistic. There are too many circumstances and competing forces that have dictated the person I am right at this very moment for anyone, including myself, to be aware of. My housemate ended up in Toronto because of his internal and external environment forcing him to make decisions, rather than some innate calling. These decisions are made through various cognitive processes which involve affect, attention, learning, memory, and other factors both knowledge and language are too elementary to articulate. However, it is not just cognitive processes in isolation, these processes rely on inputs and feedback.

These inputs are a result of outside forces like people, relationships, culture; the opportunities and access we are granted based on the identity labels imposed on us. We categorize these labels forming concepts that we weave into a narrative about our relationship to our environment. Our own identity is a byproduct of this narrative we’re engaging as a way to make sense of the world. So not only is it the external inputs and feedback from what we put out into the world, we are also informing, and limiting, our identity through our own cognition. In that way, externality plays a factor, but so does our own relation to our identity.

It is in this way that identity is more like a narrative rather than a thing in itself: the story we tell ourselves about ourselves, part of that reflected back on to us by the narrative the world concludes of us. Our identity is subject to the same perceptual limitations language as a whole is a victim to. Language is powerful yet dangerous due to dissonance between the limiting nature of definitions, perceptual factors of interpretation, and so-called reality. Many have been aware of this for a very long time; in 1971 the philosopher Linda Nochlin wrote an article titled ‘Why Are There No Great Women Artists?’. With the drum of the feminist movement beating loudly in the background, different groups were in debate over this question. Nochlin argued a more nuanced position: the language of the question is causing us to be misled, fighting the wrong war. She writes:

“The question “Why have there been no great women artists?” is simply the top tenth of an iceberg of misinterpretation and misconception; beneath lies a vast dark bulk of shaky idées reçues about the nature of art and its situational concomitants, about the nature of human abilities in general and of human excellence in particular, and the role that the social order plays in all of this.”

The very question presupposes that there have never been any great women artists since the dawn of time, which simply cannot be true. Instead, there had been no societal structures that would afford the existence of great women artists. No matter how intrinsically artististic women of past times were, no matter how many closet paintings were completed, they were never given the opportunity to identify as, or be identified as an artist.

Nochlin further references the importance of access in order to become an artist. For example during the Renaissance women were forbidden from painting nude models, barring them access to the highest form of art. In addition, we assume great art is reserved to those of ‘genius’, something only rare individuals are born with. But Nochlin reminds us:

"The problem lies… with [the] misconception… of what art is: the naive idea that art is the direct, personal expression of individual emotional experience, a translation of personal life into visual terms. Art is almost never that, great art never is. The making of art involves a self-consistent language of form, more or less dependent upon, or free from, given temporally defined conventions, schemata, or systems of notation, which have been learned or worked out [through]… a long period of individual experimentation.”

In the same way that there is a misconception that great art is the product of genius, the idea that one’s identity is representative of who they are is also falsely assumed. My housemate is subject to thoughtless assumptions and state conclusions that are rooted in identity but have little to do with him as a person. In contrast, my own situation might just be a product of Toffler’s ‘overchoice’ where I find it impossible to limit my scope enough to have a coherent identity; a phenomenon increasingly relevant in the growing digital and globalised age to those with opportunity.

Many continue to identify with the stories they tell themselves, in relationship to the stories that the world structurally reflects back onto them, as if it is some ‘true’ identity. In my case, I often feel insecure about what my bouncing around implies about who I am. Though I feel the strongest sense of self now in comparison to a more stable period of my life. Yet during the more stable periods of my life I had a more communicable identity.

Some remain marginalised because who they are is incongruent with what the world tells them they are – like a woman during the Renaissance. Some’s inability to detach from their own identity is not because of external factors per se, but because of their own psychology. We have a relationship to our identity which is informed by ourselves, but is not ourselves. In that way, identity – while sometimes empowering – can often be limiting.


Editor-in-charge; head of making me look good: Daniel Beg