“If you carry a box, you carry its contents.” – Akan proverb
Living, for many of us, is a struggle to be like everyone else by doing the things everyone else does; and striving to bring out our uniqueness. The constant scheming between conformity and individuality; and the spontaneous dance of comparison and contrast are overwhelming enough for any person to make sense of.
We thus find ourselves behaving in a particular way one moment and in another way the next moment. Like the cosmic dance, negotiating between society’s conformity and our wonderfulness unearths the unnerving question of ‘who’ in the ‘who we are’ consideration.
Wherever we find ourselves, the world compares us with others. It seems like, life has a ‘measuring app’ sticking itself right in our faces. And this app is coded with superlative and comparative adjectives highlighting who is better, best; funnier, funniest; smarter, smartest; and all the other adjectives you can imagine.
Naturally, this means we unconsciously strive to outdo each other because the world sees us in reference to each other, and never by our uniqueness. What happens then is that we struggle to conflate our unique identity with our conformity identity to project make belief identities for ourselves.
Our projected identities say much about society’s priorities and values. Do we seek to interact with individuals as they are, or we interact with them as per the conformity we expect of them? Not knowing which level to interact cause minute frictions that ultimately leads to interpersonal and group conflicts.
Whether it is ignorance or an unconscious longing, the question of identity calls us to question the object of our interpretations of personalities and group think. How do we explain our passion for identifying with the ‘melting pot’ and the passion of our individualities? When do we choose our wonderfulness over our belongingness and vice versa?
At one point in time or the other, almost all of us have questioned ‘who we are as individuals.’ Few however progress to question the ‘who we are as a humanity,’ and the role ‘who we are as individuals’ play in the identity ambivalences. Too many of us are suppressing our wonderfulness for the thrive of conformity. We are adapting ourselves to the twisted fallacy of equality. The downside is we are making the self almost irrelevant in the currency of relationships. Sadly, the world needs our wonderfulness to make it a wonderful haven.
It takes quite a while to lose our wonderfulness, but we can lose it all if we simply dive into the ‘melting pot.’ We cannot and should not always let the world tell us how we should look, what we should wear and where we should eat. That is not only quashing your identity, it is also a means of enslaving you. This is the unspoken trick of trends. They lead you to a unique thought of adaption where no differences are permitted under the guise of equality.
It is no secret that we all long to belong. Yet what we ignore is the danger of surrendering our uniqueness in order to adopt the priorities and values of the community. Your uniqueness is your way of telling the world how to relate to you. Unlike our DNA, our identities are not innate traits. They are exclusivities we claim through consistent exhibition of particular mannerisms. It flows from who we are as individuals, not as a humanity. When we keep projecting the belongingness identity too often, we hurt ourselves and we hurt our humanity.
In recent times, the surprising majority amongst us are hanging so much of our identities on our professions and our experiences, often confusing what we do with who we are. This is like the image of the box. It is full of surprises. Its phenomena is that we cannot readily see what is inside unless we open it. But then what is contained in it might not be what we were expecting. Identifying ourselves with what we do is confusing. What happens when we change what we do?
Very often, society’s quest to make governance easier, prompts her to prefer a set of attitudes. The twist is, no matter how hard she tries, we are never going to all buy into the conformity model. We are all wonderful in ways that are different. It is the Creator’s way of creating interestingness about life. And it is a means of invoking appreciation in everybody. Imagine a world in which we all had similar identities.
There would be no emotions, for we will all be doing the same things like machines and robots. There would be no valour, nor greatness. Life would be so dreary we would not have the capabilities to appreciate the flowers from the sunshine. Living is a call to give testimony of our identities. Which identity are you going to project?
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Kodwo Brumpon is an executive coach at Polygon Oval, a forward-thinking Pan African management consultancy and social impact firm driven by data analytics, with a focus on understanding the extraordinary potential and needs of organisations and businesses to help them cultivate synergies, that catapults into their strategic growth, and certifies their sustainability.
Comments, suggestions, and requests for talks and training should be sent to him at [email protected]
