What makes up who we are?

Today on a street, on a piece of ordinary pavement outside an ordinary apartment block in a foreign city, I became a pianist.  Or perhaps more accurately I realised I had become a pianist.

Some aspects of who we are are given: we are a man or a woman (usually); we are young or old; we are parents or not; we are married or not.

Some aspects of who we are are more ambiguous.

I have now been running with my running club for many years.  There are many people there who run every single week.  Yet sometimes they will not call themselves a runner.  Are you a runner?  No, not really, they shrug it off.  But really, if you run several times a week, surely at some point you can accept that you are a runner?

Some people say that identity is performative.  We are what we repeatedly do.  This brand of thinking is the same one that can tangle itself in knots trying to avoid saying a man is a man and woman is a woman.  It somehow manages to extract someone’s actions (or even intentions) from their whole selves, complete with body and mysterious inner world and surrounding community.  The fact that a person can consistently run for years and not call themselves a runner shows to me that we instinctively feel that identity is more than performative; that there’s a mysterious something that is more than the sum of our individual actions.

I have been playing the piano now for three years as an adult, and when the hotel receptionist exclaimed this morning ‘oh you’re a pianist’, I shrugged it off.  Not really, I said, the image of a concert pianist I saw playing the other day immediately lining itself up for a game of spot-the-difference.  And yet today, after playing three different grand pianos in three different locations in three days, my inner world stepped itself over the threshold of the word.

I became something more than I had been.

Does it matter, really?

I think it does.  Language has a substantiality of its own.  ‘Pianist’ for me conjured up all sorts of criteria, and some of these I think have significance.  Together we create what ‘pianist’ means.  Some people may not have as stringent requirements as mine, but at the same time, we might object to someone who plays ‘twinkle twinkle little star’ once or twice a year calling themselves a pianist.  We try to give dignity and respect to the word, by associating it with certain things: practice, diligence, love of music, love of playing, willingness to play for others.

And so once embraced, it has a magic of its own.  Ting!  It is a magic wand, a spark to the touch paper of transformation.  Becoming a pianist already makes me feel more confident, more belonging with a piano.  I think my playing is changing and will change.  I take charge of the pieces with a greater sense of my own sensibility being valid.

Embracing any new aspect of ourselves is a transformation.  Naming it is a form of welcome.  It gives permission and space and belonging.   The scale of the transformation is in proportion to the scale of meaning given to the name.  It may feel initially uncomfortable, as when a new piece of art arrives in the house, or when you have building work.  But the end result is an enriching of the home of our beings.

Some transformations, such as becoming a parent, happen to us, and we have a chance to begin the journey of living up to whatever meaning those words hold for us.  Some transformations, such as becoming a doctor or a poetess, are the result of hard work and striving.  However it arrives, a new facet of life is an invitation and a throwing down of the gauntlet; what do you make of this?

We owe it to ourselves and to the world to embrace as much as possible of who we can be.