Identity. It's a word that

Identity. It's a word that seems to get bandied about a lot these days. But what does it really mean? What is my identity, and on what does it depend? Am I simply a collection of names (Madeline, Cookie, Ms. Cohen, Mad, Rad Mad, Madso, Blaze, honey, "you"), numbers (three phone numbers, two e-mail addresses, and a couple of street addresses), nouns (lawyer, public defender, climber, skier, triathlete, writer, blogger, daughter, sister, aunt, girlfriend, activist, Democrat, traveler), and adjectives (Jewish, active, adventurous, neurotic, liberal, hard-of-hearing, legally blind, silly, smart (I hope), hot (in my dreams))? I certainly am all of these things (and more), but is my "me-ness" simply an amalgamation of resume lines and profile checkboxes or is does it transcend them all?

I've had a few conversations this week that started me thinking about identity. First, over at DeafGA, there's been some talk about whether certain people (e.g., gargantuan basketballer Yao, who apparently is hard of hearing in one ear) are "really" deaf or hard-of-hearing. More implicitly than explicitly, there seems to be a feeling among some of our members that someone whose impairment affects only one ear (or only a certain decibel range, or whatever) is not "really" (and should not identify him or herself as) deaf or hearing impaired.

A slightly different conversation, though I think reflecting a similar attitude, came with a friend whose former girlfriend, a convert to Judaism, told him that she felt she had to choose between him (a non-Jew) and her new religion. Though he was very supportive of her Judaism during their relationship, had agreed to raise their theoretical future children Jewish, and participated in many Jewish events with her, she somehow felt that her own Jewish identity was contingent on being with a Jewish partner.

Having found myself in a committed and satisfying relationship with a man who is not Jewish, I've realized that this is far from true -- my identity as a Jew comes from within me, and is neither threatened nor compromised by the fact that Steve grew up Catholic. But my friend's ex-girlfriend, a convert, is still shaping her identity as a Jewish woman. And, in a phenomenon not at all unusual among converts, she has embraced Judaism and the Jewish community with such fervor that it often seems that her identity begins and ends with her new religion. For her, then, I imagine it must have threatened her entire self-image to contemplate marrying a man who is not Jewish.

This is not meant to be an attack on my friends, nor is it meant to suggest that I am immune from exclusionary attitudes. Quite to the contrary, in many contexts I've seen myself fall prey to this very phenomenon. We often talk about poseurs, wannabes, and the like. Native Coloradans mock the transplants from either coast. Orthodox Jews look down their noses at members of the Reform movement. And die-hard powder junkies dis the lodge bunnies. What I'm really trying to understand is not group identity, but why any individual's self-identification with a particular "identifier" should threaten anyone else's sense of entitlement to the same one.

That is, does the fact that someone who wears a hearing aid in only one ear self-identifies as hearing-impaired undermine my own identity as a person with a hearing impairment? By the same token, does the fact that I don't like to identify myself as blind (though I often joke about it) threaten the identity of other blind people? If the chicks who hang out at the climbing gym in their cute little tank tops call themselves "rock climbers" even though they've never touched an actual granite cliff, does this weaken my own identity as a climber? Does the fact that my boyfriend celebrates Christmas (and hates lox) challenge my identity as a Jew? Hardly.

It would be disingenuous to say that my identity is entirely internal to me. Rather, it constantly is influenced by my experiences and by the people with whom I interact in various ways. In certain settings, with certain people, and at certain moments, I feel entirely "myself." At other times, I feel like an inexperienced actress, awkwardly wearing the costume and the make-up and carrying the props to play the role of "me," but sure that all the world can see through the greasepaint to the imposter underneath. But does my self-definition, or level of comfort in my own skin, depend on anyone else's vision of themselves?

Perhaps it is not so much that my identity is threatened by any other person's self-identification with any group or category by which I characterize myself, but that another's decision to place him or herself in a particular box calls into question my own sense of belonging there. Groucho Marx once said, "I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." The flip side of this coin is that if someone else, whose worthiness I question, wants to belong to a particular "club," it forces me to question my own identity as a member.