Identity is not something I determine or stipulate, and it does not involve identifying my falling within particular very large categories. It is not about seeing myself mirrored in my notion of what a particular large group of people is in some average or statistical sense. It is not about identifying a generalisation then generalising myself to that generalisation.
It is quite the opposite. Identity is visible only retrospectively, having performed particular acts in particular settings that only I could have performed in that particular way. Identity is thus a kaleidoscope of particularities and has no way of being generalised in perception, only apprehended like a pointilliste picture, from a distance. Identity cannot be put into words but only seen face-to-face and then forgotten as an elusive impression. It is not even the sum of its parts but an impact created by those parts that the parts have no idea of, like the dots in the pointilliste picture.
Lastly, identity can be seen only when the picture is finished, the book is closed, and what is left is the image in the retina and then the mind.
As a child (i.e. anything up to the age of 30—18 is just over half-way through childhood), any attempt to find out ‘who I was’ necessarily failed. I was looking in the wrong place, identifying whims, urges, momentary impressions and constructing a magpie’s nest of bric-a-brac, objets trouvés. What I reported was not even the beginnings of who I was.
The notion of identity can thus be discarded as something that is not remotely necessary for life. One need only do what is in front of one, without any knowledge of the ways in which one is being chiselled by God for particular performances. One need not even know necessarily which performances are vital to God’s plan. One’s whole so-called career might be a sordid diversion, a regrettable structural necessity, an empty flurry, a physiological eruption, and the point of one’s life, the thing that made one’s whole life worthwhile, might have been the right thing said to the right person in the right setting, which flipped a page, turned a corner, nudged the tiller, and did untold good of which one will never learn.