Who am I?

There are few questions that make me as uncomfortable as being asked to introduce myself.

Whenever it happens, I can almost feel my brain frantically searching for the right collection of labels, roles and descriptions. I usually end up mentioning my profession, my research area, the university I work for, perhaps that I am a mother, a partner, a friend or a daughter. Depending on the context, I might also mention where I live, how old I am, which projects I am working on, or perhaps that I seem to collect personality frameworks as a hobby.

None of these things are untrue.

What I struggle with is that none of them feel sufficient either.

Sometimes I am tempted to answer with something completely different. Something along the lines of:

"I am whatever I was before I was born, and whatever may remain when I die."

Not because I have any idea what that means.

I genuinely don't.

But every time I start listing the things I do, the roles I occupy, the groups I belong to or the characteristics that describe me, I am left with the uneasy feeling that all of those things are pointing towards something without ever quite capturing it.

At the same time, I seem incapable of resisting frameworks that promise to help me understand myself better.

Over the past year alone I have enthusiastically explored Human Design and Ayurveda. For those familiar with those worlds, I currently suspect that I am some form of Vata-Pitta type and a Manifesting Generator. Before that there were talent analyses, Myers-Briggs profiles and plenty of other systems attempting to organise the overwhelming complexity of being human into categories that fit neatly on a page.

The funny thing is that many of these frameworks have genuinely helped me.

Not because I suddenly discovered who I "really" am, but because they often provide language, reflections and practical suggestions that are surprisingly useful.

If Ayurveda suspects that I have a Vata imbalance, for example, it advises me to do things like oil my feet, eat 'kitchari', walk barefoot through a forest, or spend an evening on the couch with a hot water bottle, an Ashwagandha tea and an episode of Desperate Housewives.

To my own surprise, I have discovered that some of these recommendations work remarkably well.

Whether that proves anything about Ayurveda is a different discussion entirely. 😊

What interests me most, however, is not whether these frameworks are objectively correct.

It is the fact that they all attempt to answer a question that may ultimately be unanswerable.

Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly fascinated by a question Nora Bateson often poses:

Who am I now, when I am with you?

The question does not ask me to describe myself in isolation.

It asks something fundamentally relational.

Who am I in this conversation?

Who am I in relation to this person, this place, this moment, this ecosystem or this challenge?

The word now matters as much as the word you, because the answer is unlikely to stay the same.

The person I am with my children is not exactly the same person I am in a research meeting. The person I am while walking alone in a forest differs from the person I am while standing on a stage.

Neither version is more true than the other.

They simply emerge in different relationships.

The older I get, the less interested I become in finding a definitive answer to the question "Who am I?"

Not because the question is unimportant.

But because I increasingly suspect that identity is not a fixed thing waiting to be discovered.

It may be something that keeps emerging, changing and reshaping itself through our relationships with other people, with the living world around us and with the countless situations in which we find ourselves.

And perhaps that is why no framework has ever completely satisfied me.

The label may describe something real.

But it never quite captures the mystery.