Who Am I? Don't Know!

Lately I've been nostalgic about my late teens and early 20's. It's causing me to look at questions of identity, then and now. My recent habit of streaming AccuRadio's Alternative 80's Music has likely been a large part of this remembrance. Any reading of this post really ought to be accompanied by this music.

click above for the soundtrack of my teens and early 20's

I think another reason I keep looking back is the fact that my 20th high school reunion will be this upcoming summer. I have never attended one of those things, and have never really even considered it until this year. Mostly my friends in high school were much older, and / or went to different schools. So most of the folks with whom I would have connections at any sort of reunion would be my cohorts in grade school & junior high.

Even that is a little bit tempting; to reconnect with the people I traded lunches with and played kickball with and put our heads down on our big desks for a nap. It seems like when you know someone's childhood self, you know a bit of their original heart, before all the identities and group affiliations start crowding in and creating walls between each other.

My older brother, who was quite uninvolved in his high school even attended his reunion two years ago, and he even liked it. He recommends I go. I am very seriously considering it.

Still another reason for my reminiscence is the fact that my barbershop is redecorating, and is requesting those photos of ourselves with our embarrassing hairstyles of old to frame on an entire wall. So I led the response by supplying this photo:

Yeah, I totally stepped up. They completely loved it. I think this was from my Junior Year. So, 1987 or 1988. I would have been 15 or 16 at the taking of this picture. Yes, it's a mullet. It was the result of a "body wave" (a.k.a. perm), curling iron, and Aqua Net hairspray. Please note the rat-tail on the right. I had it dyed black, blond, and red at one point, and would divide the colors when I braided it. The bangs were slightly lightened by hydrogen peroxide, and inspired by my complete devotion to John Taylor of Duran Duran.


So my innocent high school portrait is now framed in a plastic purple and lime green asymmetrical frame on the future Wall of Hairstyle Horrors (not its actual name) at the Broadway Barbershop. They tell me that a customer recently came in and saw it, and started excitedly saying "I know that girl! I know that girl!" They asked if he went to school in the Midwest somewhere. "Oh, no. I grew up in Beaverton."

So maybe this is why I'm a bit fascinated -- this is an archetype. The sensitive new-wave girl from the late 80's. She was kind of everywhere, wasn't she? Everybody who went through that time either knew that girl or was that girl.

The Breakfast Club is the perfect illustration of this. If you went through high school in the 80's, you identified with one of those characters, didn't you? Wasn't that a great movie? The kids come to detention locked into their roles and identities, and gradually drop them and connect more genuinely. It was a total high school fantasy.

Which Breakfast Club character were you? Can you guess which one I was?

Well I wasn't quite this sensitive. But the "Basket Case" of the Breakfast Club was certainly the one I identified most closely with in high school. This and maybe the "Brainy" kid. Definitely a bit of a misfit. Never even close to the "in" crowd. My friends were the queer kids and the ones who participated in the anti-drug & alcohol stuff.

"Just Say No!" was a major feature of the 80's thanks to the Reagan years. Regardless of how we might look back at that administration, one thing that the so-called "War on Drugs" did do was route some crumbs of funding into the schools for Prevention / Intervention activities. My dear, sweet high school guidance counselor organized so many of these programs for our high school. I would go to these weekend retreats -- called Operation Snowball -- a sort of twice-a-year conference we'd hear information about substance abuse.
At Operation Snowball retreats, we got real information about all kinds of stuff -- eating disorders, sex ed, the family effects of substance abuse, including the roles of children in families with addiction issues (I realized I was somewhere between the Hero and the Rebel).

But the real reason we all attended was the small groups. We were all assigned to small groups of about 8 teens, each with an adult and teen facilitator. It was there we'd get to talk honestly and deeply about what was going on with us and our families. We'd get real listening and support from an adult willing to take a whole weekend of their lives to spend this kind of time, and from our peers. This is where I met all my friends from different schools.

Here's how cool I wasn't: Operation Snowball's slogan is, "Hugs Are Better Than Drugs."

I got to become a teen facilitator. My high school offered a Peer Counseling program, and I was a part of that all four years of school. This is where I learned Rogerian listening skills, an emotional vocabulary, and the healing power of listening.

Teens need this kind of opportunity. I've watched other prevention / intervention resources in the pacific Northwest get slashed for teens today. There's nothing like this for them now. It looks like Snowball is limited to Illinois (but they apparently have chapters in Lithuania and Poland somehow!). I feel pretty fortunate to have had that kind of exposure to alternatives to drinking and partying. I would have been mighty vulnerable to addiction to substances, and I'm grateful to those programs for teaching me just how to be with my feelings, and how to be with others' feelings.

But I digress...

Adolescence and early 20's is that precious time when we ask -- and answer-- "Who Am I?" Those answers were so important then, but their importance fades, only to be replaced by newly important answers.

So regarding the concept of identity, I'm going to make a tenuous connection to Buddhism here, and a ham-fisted attempt at talking about no-self. That 16-year-old with a mullet is completely gone. This identity that I'm feeling nostalgic about, and even this "me" that I'm identifying with now is really just a "changing stream of mental and physical processes that are constantly undergoing transformation." (quote from Indian Philosophy by Richard King).

click photo for source

A Buddhist analogy for self / no-self is like that of a river. You never see the same river twice. The river you saw last year --or even a second ago-- has completely changed with all new water, though there is this persistent sense of continuity, you really can't say it's the same river. Another analogy is how milk transforms to curd, then to butter, then to "ghee" (a highly refined butter-like substance). You can't say it's milk, but you can't say it's entirely unrelated to the milk.

I find this aspect of Buddhism -- no-self -- quite difficult! I feel quite attached to my identity -- then and now! However, I do experience the fact that maintaining that identity, for myself, and attempting to maintain others' perceptions of it is exhausting and painful. And maybe that's where my peskiest thought, "What does everybody think of me?" comes in. It's just a haunting refrain from high school, isn't it? And how useful was all that obsessing about it then? It's useless because there is no "me" to be found. Hogen keeps saying I am not a thing, but a process. I'm not sure I really "get" that in my bones and gut, but I have certainly had the experience of letting go of identity to some degree, and finding it a relief.

It reminds me of an exercise I did at a training for hospice volunteers. We were to write all the roles and identities we have on a piece of paper. And there could be hundreds of them, of course, but we got to write maybe 20-25 of them: Daughter, wife, social worker, dog-owner, Zen practitioner, driver, dragon boater, taxpayer, etc.

Then we were to take that list of 20-25, and cross out five. Which five could we part with, and how did that feel? Then cross out another five. How did that feel to subtract those aspects of identity? Then another five. I seem to recall they let us keep about five of them, but the point was, this is what happens in the process of dying. We are confronted with the relinquishing of these roles and identities that are not really who we are. And the process is a lot easier when we have already looked at that truth, and loosened our tie to a role or identity.

I'll end by quoting Seung Sahn, via Jon Kabat-Zinn.

He says that Seung Sahn, a Korean Zen Master, who came to the east coast and taught in charmingly broken English would always encourage his students to practice "Don't Know Mind" and to "only don't know." He says Seung Sahn would sit up in front of the group, meditating, and sometimes would just say things, in a long, drawn out whisper: "Whhhhhho am I ? .... Donnnn't Knnnnowwwww."

Who Am I? Don't Know.