A Positively Positive Identity Crisis
A fresh start for a few days a week.
I’ve told this story so many times, but here it goes again.
During my first week at college, as I was walking to class, I ran into my best friend from fourth grade. We hadn’t seen each other since, but in an instant, we found ourselves in a big embrace. After chatting for a few minutes, she couldn’t help but remark, “Boy, you haven’t changed a bit.”
Still to this day, I consider this to be one of the top five compliments I’ve ever received. How wonderful to be 18 years old, with the spirit of your eight-year-old self.
Twenty years later, at thirty-eight years old, I found myself at a different university campus. It’s my second year into graduate school, and I have yet to serendipitously run into an elementary school pal, or really anyone from my past. And, frankly, I don’t want to.
Though, if I did, I doubt anyone would tell me that I haven’t changed a bit.
I have!
You know, as much as I’d like to think it’s not true, having two babies, enduring a rollercoaster of freelance work, scrambling for health insurance, and surviving a global pandemic as a new mom has changed ya girl. I’m more serious. I’m disciplined. I’m harder but softer. Duller, yet sharper. More colorful, still grayer.
Of course, I am still me. And, in far more ways than I care to admit, I remain the Hello Kitty-obsessed fourth grader who improvised comedic sketches every afternoon while waiting for school pickup.
But, I’d be delusional to not acknowledge that the transformation I’ve felt in the past few years has been pretty significant. For a while, I didn’t notice the tectonic shifts underneath the surface. I was being reconstructed from the inside out, but being stuck at home for literal years made it difficult to see it happening in real time. Context matters, and between two babies, working from home, and stay-at-home orders, I had zero feedback beyond the reverberations from my own walls.
That is until recently when I started going to class three days a week. Yes, like actually going to a college campus and sitting in lecture rooms, as I frequently explain to people who are flabbergasted that in the age of Zoom, class still happens. I started my program last year but only attended class in person once a week. The frequency was just enough to feel quaint, but not like a real part of my life. It’s like I got to dip into a sliding-door version of my life for a few hours a week.
This year is totally different. I am taking two classes, one of which meets twice a week, and the other has a lab attached to it. All in all, I have 10 hours of in-person class time per week, and I have joined a research lab on campus. Between all these in-person commitments, I started to make…friends? I am developing new relationships that fulfill roles in my life that I didn’t even know were open.
It’s wonderful, but also totally surreal. I’m having, what I think is a positive identity crisis.
After having children, and being stuck at home due to the pandemic, I never went back to work. Having been let go from my last full-time job while pregnant, I’d been freelancing and working remotely for years. The task of trying to fit my new self into my old work life wasn’t something I had to do. And trust me, I don’t envy that transition. It seems extremely disorienting to come back completely turned inside out, while everyone treats you exactly the same.
For me, my work and parenting have evolved into an intertwining, fluid mess. I often don’t know where the labor of one ends and the other starts. It’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just different than other people’s experiences.
When I’m on campus, I’m not anyone I am now or anyone I used to be. No one knows me as a copywriter. No one knows me as a VP of anything. No one knows what the hell 75 percent of my resume means. And, perhaps most poignantly, no one knows me as a parent!
Most of the new environments, communities, and contexts I’ve found myself in these past few years have been because of my children. Preschool, mommy and me, music class, the damn playground––most new people have come into my life by way of kids.
At school, I’m just Heather, a master’s student in the Positive Organizational Psychology program. I don’t have a ton of conversations about my current professional projects, or my personal life. I talk about implicit leadership theory, discuss evaluation procedures, complain about how hard statistics is, and debate the ethics of social science research. And I have major imposter syndrome about ALL of it. It feels like everyone else knows what they’re talking about. They all have psychology backgrounds. And all I know how to do is make Instagram copy punchier, brands sound more like people, and websites more crawlable by Google algorirthms.
Who invited the copywriter? Who let the frazzled newish mom in the room?
Throughout my life, I’ve gravitated towards things that were easy for me. I’ve always been savvy with my strengths, known how to play into my natural abilities, and provided myself with whatever I needed for a smooth ride. Except this. This program is the first time I’ve purposely put myself on a path where I knew it was going to be extremely hard, I didn’t have any experience, and I earnestly didn’t know if I would succeed. I just knew that I had to do it.
Well, this and motherhood. Though to be very fair, while I understood that being a parent was challenging in an abstract way going into it, I was not prepared for the absolute rigor it presents in new ways every single day. There is no studying or enlightenment for that.
“Wow, how are you doing this with kids? That seems hard,” is the response I usually get when I tell people what I’ve been up to. It is so hard.
But, as a good friend (and fellow mom) so astutely pointed out a few days ago, perhaps it is motherhood that propelled me into trying to pursue graduate school in a subject I’ve never studied, while caring for two small kids, and trying to keep a career afloat until I can jump to the next thing. In her words, motherhood gave me the guts to say, “challenge accepted,” because what could be harder than being a parent?
I am working very hard, at home, at work, and now at school. I’ve never worked harder in my whole life.
It’s genuinely very cool to have this rare gift of a clean slate where no one knows me as anyone I’ve ever been before. It’s refreshing after feeling so physically and emotionally stifled the past few years. But, for right now it’s only for three days a week. And, that’s for the best. I don’t need more than that right now. The rest of the week, I’m still all of my old selves, very messily and beautifully enmeshed. I only have to look at my iPad notes to be reminded of all the things I am, and all the things I can be.
