A Sense of Identity

A Journey of Meaning

I’m forty years old, and I’ve been thinking on some level about my identity since I was no older than thirteen years old—it may have been earlier, but I don’t recall. I grew up in an Italian and Irish American family—on my mother’s side, in Massachusetts, and was raised Catholic. These are strong identity roots, and I connected with them strongly.

When I was thirteen, I started getting bullied relentlessly for about two years. The bullying, as is often the case, wasn’t rooted in who I was as much as who the bullies were, but a thirteen year old doesn’t know that. 

During that bullying, one of the things that came up, was that I was— in the eyes of seventh and eighth grade Catholic schoolers— a Jew. They told me that my last name was Jewish, and that my nose was big. They would pull the ham out of their sandwiches and wave it in front of my face, telling me that the Jewish dilemma was ham, half off.

As far as I was concerned, I was Catholic, and Italian and Irish. I knew that my dad had some French Canadian, and some Native American, but I wasn’t aware of any Jewish heritage. I asked my parents, and they told me that my paternal grandfather had been Jewish. He had been estranged from my father basically his entire life, so he had become a subject that I knew very little about.

Being bullied for being Jewish-ish sucked. But in that time, I started connecting with the identity of being Jewish. I had been shunned by a bunch of Italian, Irish, and Polish Catholics, and so I must be Jewish. I wanted to belong somewhere.

Over the course of my high school years, I struggled with depression, it had started with the two years of relentless bullying, but I still struggled with it throughout high school—I wasn’t bullied at all in high school. My senior year, after a teacher saw that I had self harmed, I began therapy, and learned that I was Manic Depressive.

I started college, as a guy who thought of himself as ‘Jewish-ish’ and a Manic Depressive. I knew who I was for the first time in my life. It felt good. College brought about lots of new experiences, and people. Some of those people being actual Jewish people.

I had Jewish friends, and felt like ‘these are my people,’ but it wasn’t long before I referred to myself as ‘Jewish’ and was quickly corrected. There was no malice in it, these weren’t bullies, but there was a sense of ‘we have a cultural identity and it’s not yours.’ 

They weren’t wrong, but it sucked. I had been kicked out of yet another identity, even if this one I legitimately had zero claim to. But I was still manic depressive. I still had that.

My identity as a manic depressive— or as it has been explained to me it’s now called bi-polar disorder— has been the identity that has stuck around the longest. By the time I made it to college, when I would talk to people about it, I wasn’t a newbie or a visitor in that space. I was accepted and on the same level as the few other kids who had probably been diagnosed in the previous year or two. Through my twenties I struggled but I was never treated as an outsider when it came to manic depressive or bi-polar disorder.

In my thirties, I met with a new therapist, I hadn’t been to therapy in a couple of years, and I was having a rough time, so I met with him once, and we discussed my history. I explained that I had been diagnosed a by two separate therapists in the past, and then we started talking about my symptoms and my cycles, and he explained that things had changed. I had meet the criteria in 2003 and 2005 for bi-polar disorder, but they had revised the DSM, and that my cycles between high and low were too slow and too long to be considered bi-polar by the current standards. 

I am no longer bi-polar, or manic depressive. But not because I’m better. The identity goal post had been moved on me. I was pretty resentful when I learned this. I never went back to that therapist, in fact, I didn’t seen another therapist for about a decade, until right after I turned 40.

I had a therapy session today, and during it, she confirmed what that therapist 10 years ago had said. This time, I had changed though. I don’t see this as a betrayal, I’m not resentful of that fact. I just recognize that I’m living in one flow of movement, and the DSM and psychological community, in fact the scientific community is moving in another.

That’s fine, we have different goals. Their goal is to help people, and to be as accurate and thorough as possible. My goal needs to be my mental health, and not my identity, when it comes to therapy. I’ve accepted that.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have some search for identity continuing in my brain. In fact, if you’re subscribed here, you’ll see that there is a post every week on my “Without A Tether” posts, in which I use time travel, and try to force myself into an outside perspective to explore my identity. 

Outside of my writing efforts, I’m a father, and a husband two things that I rarely feel I’m good enough at, but they are identities that I’m very proud of. They are the most important identities I can focus on. I’m also aware that when my son becomes a teenager, he may try to push back on me claiming that identity. But I also know that with these two, if I keep putting in the effort, and I will maintain these identities for the long haul.