Who am I in a Pandemic?
I was asked to write this piece about identity, and I’ve been putting it off for weeks. With Zoom quizzes, a park picnic with new friends, jobs to apply for, and online therapy to attend; there have been plenty of distractions.
I’ve often been criticised for the way I write and so I’ve actively avoided doing so, until April this year when I wrote a piece on LinkedIn about bringing my whole self to work. The response was really overwhelming, with people sharing my words and messaging to say I’d captured something that resonated with their experience – who’d have thought it, eh?
So why have I avoided this? Because I’m having an identity crisis and don’t know who I am anymore.
“ I’m having an identity crisis and don’t know who I am anymore.”
Lockdown has seemingly pushed a lot of us to reflect on so many aspects of ourselves, including the space we take up, and who we are in this world. As a Drag Queen, it’s commonplace for people to assume I’m uber confident and self-assured: it’s true that dressing like a woman and swimming against society’s flow requires you to really know yourself. But my alter ego exists in the context of things being in control, as they were six months ago when I also had a steady job, my own place and some semblance of a route in life. Cut to July 2020, and I’ve moved across the world and back again, lost my job, and I’m now living in a friend’s place (while she’s unceremoniously locked down in New Zealand), in a town I’ve never lived in with nobody around me that I know.
It’s almost like everything I thought I knew has dissipated – my direction, a sense of purpose, the future. These themes that make up our essence and create an identity for us have been all but banished into a COVID abyss, seemingly never to return to their former glory.
“ It’s almost like everything I thought I knew has dissipated.”
I’m getting somewhere though. Overall, I’m learning that I don’t need my identity right now. I need survival. Other people have it worse and that’s important to recognise – but their life isn’t mine and mine isn’t theirs.
When the axis of the world is jolted, how I identify is as part of a movement of people looking inwards at themselves. It’s our collective suffering that currently defines us, because it sets us up for a time when we get to move forward again. And that hope of moving forward is not to a place where I have gainful employment or my own place, but one where I can continue to carve out the person I am.
Self-discovery is a process. It’s not a race when there’s no finish line.
Article Written by Sal Mohammed
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