Thoughts on Identity and True Self

A little over a year ago, my world fell apart.  After a few months of playing doctor (with the assistance of my real doctor friends), I pieced together what was wrong with myself and was able to find a doctor locally that was able to make a treatment plan.  While I think it's easier to predict how a chronic disorder can effect you physically and even mentally, what I never really expected was what it would do/continues to do to my identity.

If you would have asked me to describe myself before this all happened, I would have probably bet a lot of money that I was extremely healthy and fit.  Needless to say, one of the many things that I've learned over the last year is that I have hard physical limits.  If I go beyond those limits, then I could potentially be paying with days, weeks, and even months in misery.

POTS/dysautomia has really caused me to rethink my identity and what identity is in the first place.  My picture of myself has had dramatic changes over the years.  However, every previous time I actively chose who I did or did not want to become.  I was at the helm directing my life and controlling my outcome. 

This transformation by choice allowed me to find examples of the person I wanted to be and then make the necessary changes for me to grow in that way.  Now I am experiencing transformation by force.  I realize that am not so much at the helm as being dealt a hand of cards.

Maybe my actions of the past were less about my brilliance in navigating murky waters, but being able to play an already good hand well.  Much of who I thought I was is being put to the test.  Some concepts/stories I told myself are no longer true, while the jury is still out on many others.

Here are a few things that I have learned about identity and resilience over the last year:

• Identities based on physical attributes are the most fragile.  Only the most innate physical features (ie. height) will stand the test of time.  Everything else will change, probably for the worst, as you age.
• Identities based on mental attributes aren't much safer.  It's been pretty remarkable to me to see myself go from (what I view as) intelligence and quick witted to being barely able to form a thought within the span of a few minutes.

This has all lead me to the question - is this set of stories that we cobble together, that we use to describe and define ourselves, that we use to predict how we will act in any situations, really needed? 

It's clearly not who we really are.  Could I really say that I was strong and healthy, when a day later I would be in and out of a hospital for a month?  Either I was completely wrong in who I thought I was (which is entirely possible), or it was all an illusion.

Maybe I was really this amorphous being watching everything happen.  I am the watcher of my thoughts, my feelings, the events and stimuli occurring around me. And maybe, because I obsessively need to compartmentalize and define everything, I felt compelled to spend the last three and half decades weaving a set a stories to help define what this being is.  All the while not realizing that I wasn't actually defining myself, but the supposed relation of myself to everything I come in contact with.