After spending two weeks of my summer (two terrific weeks!) with teachers who deal with children/teens in their earlier development, I found myself thinking more about how we build our identities. This is a topic I’ve been interested in for a while, but whenever you start focusing on something like that everything around you starts to speak to it so I’m going to share some diverse links that have come together recently for me regarding identity.
A few days ago I finished watching a documentary called Last Train Home via Netflix. This documentary traces a family where the mother and father live away from home for all but about a week at New Year in a textile factory. A grandmother raises the children one of whom is a female teen. You think that the film is going to be about the parents but it many ways it is more about the daughter how she represents the next generation of Chinese workers. Even those who grew up in the rural areas (as you see more of in the other documentary I finished Up the Yangtze) still know enough about the “outside world” to want something more out of life then simply doing what their parents have told them. Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t feel that drive, at least a little, to rebel? To be free? To be independent? To have their own identity?
The daughter in Up the Yangtze is a bit more timid, but you can still see that craving for . . . something. In her case, she wants more of an education but without money she can not have that. I came away really wondering what will happen to her? Will her life working on a cruise ship at the age of 16 be her life?
I have a hard time deciding if I should say I grew up poor, dysfunctional etc because my extremes are still no where near what others have experienced, but is all relative isn’t it? I’ve written several different things thinking about my own past (and not just in my poetry!), but I thought I’d share a personal essay today that tries to ponder why/when I decided Math Sucked. Why is my identity built, at least in part, around my inability to convert fractions to decimals and back again?
Perhaps this is a good writing prompt for you today: is there some part of your identity, some name you give yourself (writer, mother, daughter, religious person etc) that you can tell the story of?
See you tomorrow for Thursday poem share!
Wow you are turning me onto so many good docs!
I feel the same way about how I grew up, should I, or shouldn’t I share stuff…especially when I meet others who had a much harder life, but I learn.
Interesting writing prompt…hmmm, who am I…
I LOVE my documentaries
I think we all learn from everyone’s story. There is an interesting 19 year old male in the “Up the Yangtze” documentary who represents a lot of the potentially spoiled single children in China.
And thanks for continuing to comment. Seems like blog traffic is dying down. Although, Referential appears to be up so who knows!
Its the peak of the summer, mine are down too, they will pick back up in a month, and Debbie is house sitting, maybe busy with her daughter…I am a part-time working wife who’s husband travels
but I love ya, so i will keep reading, you do teach me so much! No rear kissing here, but honesty…
And I always learn from my “students.” I think of myself and everyone as like eternal students!
My thesis was all about identity and how it is functions in the life of a writer. Stanley Kunitz has spoken about the act of writing as it serves to make our lives into legends. I call it creating a personal mythology, where identity has independent and dependent roles that move from the individual, to relationships/roles, and outward further to more communal identities, like political, regional and religious. It’s something I think about all the time actually, how we can be actively creating our identities through constantly refining, defining and redefining our writing, minds and visions of ourselves.
I used to be very obsessed with the notion of developing a personal mythology after reading poets like William Blake in high school. I think I tried to force specific metaphors into my young writing, but now it is more fun to look for the unexpected connections you make in your work. I never want to stop learning (as my student comment says above as well!) Thanks for joining in the conversation