My daughter and I had a conversation yesterday that paralleled a train of thought I had been having about personal identity and how it relates to activities, events, and plans. And how really unhealthy I have been sometimes about it.
I have been dating. And as is required during the first few dates, there are the required interview questions. Where do you work? What college did you go to? Tell me about your favorite vacation? All good enough questions to help paint the landscape. But the answers were sometimes awkward in my head because of the pronouns I assigned.
See, if I talked about graduation, or jobs, that was pretty easy most of the time. *I* went to college in Sacramento. *I* have worked for the government for the last 16 years. *I* write a blog that let's my innermost thoughts be critiqued by the random public. *I* have a pretty fucked up sense of self that is wrapped around approval and permission from others. But when I talk about events, or travels, or activities, it always defaulted to *we*.
It is as if I had not gone to the White House. That was a We Went. I must not have gone on the ferry to Alcatraz, because WE went on the boat together. I couldn't have seen a Broadway play because WE sat next to each other. We rode the cable car. We saw the band. We sat in the box seats. We saw the world's largest knitting needles. We ate the fresh baked french bread. We. We. We. As if I had no memory of doing them myself without that identifier. Fuck, really? This was MY story wasn't it? The person I was telling the story would only get the details I wanted, and yet, here I was still giving credit to my journey to a couplehood that no longer existed, and that I was specifically trying to have not be part of my moving forward love life.
Turns out, my daughter does this, too. And she and I together thought it was both funny and sad that we did this for not just major events like vacations, but for everyday things as well, like taking public transportation or grocery shopping. Were we really so involved in our significant others that we had legit lost ourselves into the identity being as a couple? Apparently, yes. The partners in our lives (or formerly in our lives) had no problems with the word *I*, even if it was a couple event. They could easily say "I went to a really great steak place", or "I bought some really great fresh blueberries", even if both events only happened because either she or I were that responsible party.
She and I decided this was pathetic, and something women do more than men, and realized that changing it was going to be harder than it sounded. There would need to be events we owned, and activities we participated in, and conversations about them after that we would describe to others using individual pronouns on purpose. *I* went to the museum in Kansas City to see the Caravaggio. *I* went to the Cirque du Soleil show in Vegas right before the shutdown. I bought this really pretty poster. I saw my favorite band. I climbed the Lyon Street street stairs to find the hidden SF Heart.
She validated for me that I had, in fact, done lots of stuff. That I was both capable of doing them, and had experienced them with my own memory without that need for others to always be in the same memory bubble conversation. I validated to her that I had probably modeled that for her, and she was doing the same memory building for herself, with her own activities and life, even if they happened to have someone else along for the experience. They could own it, too, without either of our acknowledgment, and it took nothing away from anyone's experience to have it belong to ourselves. Especially in personal pronoun format when telling our stories to someone else. We did not have to be beholden, or even share in the joy. Each of us could be *I*, and anyone else that sailed in our ocean could be an *I* as well.
I truly hope to become part of an US and a WE again. I actually like couplehood, and I am holding interviews right now for the position. But I also need to see how MY identity and memories are completely separate from that, and how that is actually a much more healthy way to be. Maybe I could model it for my daughter, and she won't get lost to it either. Our *I* identities are counting on it and there is too much stuff for she and I to do!
