I thought I was this, that, and the other. (Arguably) male, British and French, of a particular social background, with a particular sexuality, and half a dozen other labels.
These, of course, tell someone absolutely nothing about me. These labels are quite meaningless. What is a triangle? Try to imagine one: whatever one imagines is not a triangle but a particular triangle, namely scalene, isosceles, or quadrilateral. It is impossible to imagine a triangle in the abstract (thank you, George Berkeley). It is the same with these labels. James is British. So is Derek. James and Derek are entirely different people. It's difficult to think of anything that James and Derek have in common. Not only is their Britishness expressed very differently in each, but their Britishness is a drop in the comprehensive ocean of their actual identities. Thus, to say that they are both British really tells us nothing at all. Fish-and-chips British or Gustav Holst British? Royal Academy Summer Exhibition British or Ant and Dec British? Piling half a dozen other labels on top won't help. Let's take the label gay. Alan-Bennett gay or Vauxhall-sex-club gay? The plan to construct an identity from a roster of group identifications is doomed. Any such list is uninformative.
Imagine Anthea. Anthea is British, ethnically English and Irish, female biologically, female-gendered, lesbian, and upper middle class. Six labels, about which we know an awful lot, through knowledge and association. Yet do you feel you know anything insightful or valuable about Anthea? Do you know her? Safe pair of hands? Trustworthy? Who knows?
Let's try another set of labels. Anthea has brown hair and green eyes, is five foot seven, weighs nine stone three, has moles on her arms, and has straight hair. Do you know her? Safe pair of hands? Trustworthy? Who knows?
Let's take, rather than a list of identities or characteristics, a list of choices, most of them moral. Anthea decided to leave a lucrative job as a barrister and teach on a bar vocational course. She has acquired a series of dogs over the years, and the dogs are fully part of the household. They go for very long walks together over the Sussex Downs. She is fond of Housman. She sponsors a dozen people in AA, and spends a lot of time on such activities. She took in a Ukrainian refugee to live in her house. She is married and has stayed devoted to her spouse through thick and thin. Safe pair of hands? Trustworthy? Odds on, yes. One feels one would instantly recognise Anthea if one met her.
We are in a sense our own parents, and we give birth to ourselves by our own free choice of what is good. Such a choice becomes possible for us when we have received God into ourselves and have become children of God, children of the Most High.
St Gregory of Nyssa
The word identity, which once meant oneness (around 1460 onwards), acquired a new meaning in the early eighteenth century:
Who or what a person or thing is; a distinct impression of a single person or thing presented to or perceived by others; a set of characteristics or a description that distinguishes a person or thing from others.
Now, to define by group appurtenance is actually quite the opposite of this: it is to define the person not by what distinguishes them but by what joins them, yet what they are joined with is itself disparate and not capable of lending any character. It is the phantom of the abstract triangle, which cannot be visualised. Sally is a triangle. Fine. But what sort of triangle? It is that that is significant.
Real identity is the set of very particular choices I have made in my life; not inherent dispositions, because such dispositions are really potentialities, not facts. Even with the identity labels, being British means nothing. Being gay means nothing. What these two characteristics tell us about a person depends on what they do with either of those. Join an extreme nationalist political faction or go to the Proms? Grub around in sex venues or enter into a monogamous marriage? What one discovers is that one has far more in common with the fellow extremist or the fellow Proms-goer than one does with someone with whom one shares a nationality. The extremist or the Proms-goer might have nothing else in common, label-wise, but nonetheless be a pea in a pod in a thousand material ways.
Identity is not a set of empty shells but the content of those shells, and the content is not decided until all of one's moral choices have been made. The deathbed conversion or the deathbed failure to repent might be the defining acts of the person's life, lending all that came before their true colour.
In other words, identity was not something I would legitimately seek or stipulate, particularly in the first few decades of my life before most of the important moral and other choices had been made; in fact, the first few decades of my life tended to exhibit all sorts of ungainly and unseemly lurchings into domains of experimentation. Who, of a certain generation, did not have a communist phase, as least of a few days? I did, as did many of my friends. And how many of those are communists today? Not a one. Any stipulations or conclusions about my identity I made as a teen and in my early twenties were written on wind and water. Now in my fifties, with thirty years of AA and Al-Anon behind me, arguably something of an identity is starting to develop, at least in others' eyes. But certainly not mine.
In the truth of identity, I am the worst judge thereof. I am the last person to ask. There are no mirrors in the world of identity, and the only person who has no actual experience of themselves is the person themselves. It is others who experience me. I experience only the operation of my ship and my apprehension of the world around me and others. I axiomatically cannot experience myself. A sense of self is a conceit, a chimera, a fiction. So don't ask me about my identity.
Instead, one can ask a person: What did you do today?
That, by contrast, is greatly informative.
In Step Eleven, we seek knowledge of God's will for us and the power to carry that out. Pages 86 to 88 make clear that lies not in self-regarding but in the laying of a trail of actions through the day.
My identity is the path trod, the road trudged, and, if I attend to the path, the road, my identity, such as it is, and such is its usefulness, can be cheerfully left to others and to posterity.