Going Back to the Masters

You’d never know it, but the 51-year-old man you see when you look at my profile picture still carries with him the scars and bruises from his childhood and adolescence. Almost every day, some sensation takes me back to my apartment in Penndel, Pennsylvania, or the hallways of Neshaminy High School.

I smell a hyacinth, and I am immediately transported back to the basement of my harsh and intimidating grandfather. I taste a fajita, and I remember my visit with the Hawthornes in Roby, Texas, the stiflingly hot sun on my neck and the flat, empty streets. When I hear the words “art appreciation,” a wearied resentment builds up in my stomach, and I think of Ms. McClintock, my third-grade teacher punishing me because I told her I didn’t like Art class.

My strongest memories, however, are reserved for my adolescence. Just three years after my father’s descent into chronic depression, I entered 6th grade with a mouth full of braces and the feeling that everyone’s eyes were boring holes through the back of my head. Every snicker was directed at me. Every mistake I made bent my stature a little further. I was the perfect target for bullying. I would cower at any confrontation and blame myself for being weak. I had lost my parents–one to depression, and the other to grief–and was left defenseless and vulnerable.

My relief came by the end of high school when I found two groups of people in succession who took me in and treated me kindly. Once I found my footing, my identity slowly began taking shape. Who was I? I decided that I was a person who was wounded, and who wanted to help others who were wounded, too.

As we grow older, we put aside a lot of the narcissism of that period and move on to adult things. Personally, I don’t miss those years. For some, those were the best times. For me, they were a time I’m glad has been left behind. Or has it?

Right now, my two children are 16 and 14 years old. Their behavior is full of contradiction and hyperbole. They are at times sullen, at other times volatile, and most times, pleasant and thoughtful. They don’t tell me everything like they used to. They find me embarrassing at times. I am pretty sure they feel my love and support, and I know that they need to break away from me and find out who they are and what they are about. I know that this process is confusing, disturbing and difficult to navigate. I wish that I could just “fix it” for them, but this is a journey they need to take on their own, guiding them with my example and presence.

Academic that I am, I decided to get my own form of guidance by going back to one of the masters of adolescent development–Erik Erikson. I had, of course, studied Erikson’s theories in graduate school, but I had never actually read anything that he wrote himself. So I decided to read his influential book, Identity: Youth and Crisis. What an amazing description of the crises and excitement of this time!

In short, Erikson says that the period of adolescence contains within it a crisis of identity. The adolescent, who is beginning to feel the pull of society away from childish things and toward the adult world, wonders how he will fit in, how he will carve out his own personality, and how his unique way of being will contribute to his society’s betterment. To that end, he will try out different roles, peer groups, and personality types, in an attempt to locate the “self” that “belongs” to him. The achievement of identity is described with enjoyable precision as:

“A subjective sense of an invigorating sameness and continuity…”

The experience of this feeling comes more and more frequently as the well-adjusted adolescent matures, and “always includes an element of active tension.” The adolescent is trying to find an identity that will guarantee success and happiness, while at the same time knowing deep down that this guarantee is an illusion. Nonetheless, the gradual commitment to a specific style of being brings “a sort of deep enthusiastic bliss, of bitter willingness to do and suffer anything” in order to defend the growing self-image.

While the search for identity seems boundless, in fact, the quantity and quality of identities are limited by the experiences the adolescent has encountered across the lifespan. The adolescent’s infancy has taught her to have a certain admixture of trust and mistrust in the world. She has also been given a life history of tools that give her, at times, the courage of autonomy, and at other times, the morass of self-doubt. She has had some mastery experiences, which have taught her that she can achieve what she pursues, and some failures, which have given her some level of inferiority.

It is this very singular combination of personality-forming experiences, along with a very specific set of environmental potentialities (e.g. the wealth and cultural capital to take hold of what is available) that bring the adolescent to her range of noticeable identities. Erikson warns us against our all-too-human proclivities to demonize other people whose identities seem foreign to us, remembering that our “former environments are forever in us; and since we live in a continuous process of making the present “former”, we never—not even as a newborn—meet any environment as a person who never had an environment.”

Identity Essential Reads

The Existential Crisis of Digital Identity

Your Self-Story Is a Lie

Identity formation is a scary time, ironically full of exciting leaps and bounds in understanding. I am looking forward to seeing how it unfolds in my own children, worried about the disappointments and heartaches that are bound to occur, but hopeful that in the end, they will develop an adult sense of ethics that can let them experience the fullness of what it means to be human.