Identity
“The day you learn to identify solely as a person in progress will be the day you set yourself free.” - Advice From A Wise Soul.
One of my favorite things to laugh about is how impressive the future version of myself that lives in my head is. I have worked diligently over the past decade to learn how to love myself at any moment, but no matter how far I have come, there still exists a “next week version of me” in my mind. And let me tell you, that guy has it all figured out.
Don’t get me wrong—“Current Clayton” is great, but “Future Clayton” is where it’s at. He will easily remove all of the patterns that currently plague my life. I am currently unsure how you can get a six-pack in a week. Still, I am confident he will figure it out—even without Current Clayton having to do a single crunch.
Achieving future greatness without being inconvenienced in the present moment is where my internal delusions quickly approach grandeur.
And if, for some reason, he is not sure how to get there, he will have support from all of the past versions of himself. Each of them had a secret addiction that they never shared with the world: purchasing self-help workbooks and never even filling out a single page.
I have over twenty of them. They occupy their own section on my bookcase. I cannot throw them away because a future version of myself may finally feel a burst of inspiration and want to complete one of them.
Today isn’t that day.
Welcome to the cycle.
At the beginning of my healing journey, I completed one singular exercise from the first self-help workbook I purchased. In it, I was asked to list all of my identities individually and pair them together to see how they correlated.
At that time, almost every identity was rooted in who I was to the people around me, and there was nothing on there that I had given or claimed for myself.
What stuck out to me most was how every list started with my sexuality. Before I was a brother or son or even listed for what I did for a living, I was Gay. If I had to write my tombstone at that time, it likely would have said the following:
“Clayton Maderia
Born: 1987 - Died: (hopefully somewhere like 2587 because he figured out time travel or became the vampire he always hoped he would be)
GAY….and some other stuff too.”
At the beginning of my coming out journey, I was angry at the world for the fact that I would be known most for my sexuality, which I would never have chosen in the first place. Yet, as I stared at all of the lists and combinations of identities in the workbook, I realized that somewhere along the way, I had begun to define myself solely by the thing I resented most.
As I sat and wondered how it all came to be, I quickly realized that the reason I led off with gay had very little to do with pride (since I felt so little at that time) and everything to do with safety.
Of all of my identities, my sexuality was not only the most threatening to others but the most dangerous to my own life. Even to this day, no one has ever threatened to kill me for being “a boy,” but I can’t count the number of times that it has happened when someone found out that I was gay.
Additionally, I was taught early on by those I loved to lead with the things we believed were unlovable, as if to admit to those around you that you also acknowledged the elephant in the room. Even at her lightest, my mother would walk up to relatives we hadn’t seen in a while and say, “Hi, I know I look so fat; I’ve gained weight.”
It was a reflex of shame and embarrassment programmed into me early. So, while the world may have seen my proclamation of my sexuality as pride, the message underneath it was simple:
“Hi, my name is Clayton. I am Gay. I know that makes me unlovable. Please don’t hurt me for it, I promise I am already hurting myself enough.”
A few years ago, I started Nuerotherapy to help rewire my brain. I had recently found a therapist who was a trauma survivor himself who believed that not only could we use the modality to help reverse the effects of growing up in a violent home (and all of the other trauma that came after), but we would also be able to get a map of how my brain was actually working at that time.
I wasn’t hopeful that I could actually be healed, but at that point, I was willing to try anything. I had been in therapy for four years, and even though I had been diagnosed as having CPTSD (Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) by a previous therapist, I needed proof.
I needed proof that my brain actually was wired differently and that I wasn’t just a broken person with a sad backstory.
When I finally received it, I felt like the most significant weight of my life had been lifted off my shoulders.
Throughout our work together, my therapist and Neurofeedback Coach often said the same thing, “I need you to trust me because I know we can get you to a place that you don’t even believe is possible currently.” I didn’t once believe in his visions for me, but I couldn’t deny that I felt better mentally than ever before.
As I continued with my sessions and progress, it became clear to him that we were approaching a significant milestone: a day when my brain waves would no longer be within the classification limits for having CPTSD.
I had spent all of my life wishing I could undo the effects of what had been done to me, but I didn’t believe I ever actually would. Once the finish line became possible, I set a goal to celebrate it in the biggest way possible, even though I had no idea how to properly celebrate something I had previously deemed a miracle.
When the day finally came that my assessment returned all of the necessary markers well within the green limits, my therapist burst with pride, and I felt nothing.
My diagnosis had given me a lifeline and an explanation for so much I never thought I would be able to explain. Additionally, the identity of being someone who had endured pain but was actively working through it was not only celebrated in our culture but something that had become a crutch.
I expected to feel relief, but instead, I just felt lost.
I knew how to be a traumatized person trying to exist in a chaotic world. I didn’t know how to be a healthy one.
My “big celebration” was me telling a few friends that I had done it and then sobbing hysterically on the floor for an hour because the only identity I had ever felt validated by was gone.
I never fully grasped how greatly my attachment to identities had caused my own rigidity until I got the advice quoted above to learn to be a person in progress.
For most of my life, safety was colored only in black and white. I felt lucky that my sexuality and gender expression were clear to me because nothing in my life was set up to fall anywhere in the messy middle.
If there was an option to be claimed that clearly fell on one side of the line, I identified with it, especially if it could help promote the things that I believed to be more lovable, like masculinity, intelligence, and maturity.
What I missed along the way was that every time I checked off another identity box, I further segmented myself and restricted my freedom.
The problem wasn’t the world; it was me.
When a mentor suggested releasing my many identities and only identifying as someone in progress, I immediately looked forward to the challenge. I identified strongly as someone who loved a challenge.
In the weeks and months after, I went back through the list of the many identities I had claimed, but this time from a different perspective. I asked myself not only where the identity started but also whether or not it still applied to my life and if it felt in my body as truth.
What I found was that almost all of the things I claimed were the products of random moments from the past that I just took with me along the path without ever questioning why I was still carrying them.
The central theme I found was some version of, “This random person found this to be lovable/attractive/worthy, so I made it my personality.”
But the truth is that I am no longer the person that I was in those moments. I wouldn’t wear clothes from when I was a teenager, so why am I still trying to wear outdated costumes?
More than anything, I realized how much I was restricting myself from what I crave most: possibility.
By sitting rigidly and safely on one end of every spectrum, I miss the opportunity to experience all of its other facets. Although, at the end of my exploration, I may find myself in the exact same place, I will at least be sitting there with the knowledge that anything can change if I feel called to it.
When I view my life through the lens of progress, I release not only my identities but also the expectations, judgments, perfectionism, and immobility that come with them.
I named this newsletter “Snapshots” because that is what each of these newsletters is: a singular view of what I am learning about a specific topic each week. Since many of these are life themes, I am sure to revisit them repeatedly over time, each time with a slightly different view.
And that is the point. I no longer want to live in a world where the person who denies my freedom the most is myself. So, I am choosing progress and impermanence.
That is where I feel most free to be myself every moment without fear of doing it wrong. Each time that I allow myself to just be, I take a little bit more pressure off of “Future Clayton” to figure it all out.
Although, in full confidence, I really hope he makes the Vampire thing happen.
With Love,
Clayton
Thank you for sharing this. I fear I’ve been holding on rigidly to my newfound adhd+autism identity and this has me wondering if I, too, could see myself more as in progress.