You are under no obligation to be the same person you were five minutes ago.

– Alan Watts

My first thought on reading Watt’s words this day was that if the opposite was true – you are obliged to be the same person you were five minutes ago – none of us ever turned into fully functioning adult members of society. We would still not be able to walk. (Not to mention that as it would also be true for our ancestors, they never procreated, and we wouldn’t even be here.) Beware of extreme interpretations.

In her post on LinkedIn, Andee Scarantino advocated for letting go when it is time to let go. Of things, people, projects, jobs…

“Sometimes, we want to continue paying respect to our past. We often believe that if we don’t, it discredits what we’ve done or who we’ve been.”

– Andee Scarantino

In me, her post landed in a place that led to the title of this piece: Identity hoarding.

My thoughts went by the way of letting go of things. A person who is pathologically not able to let go of things will typically get a diagnosis of hoarding disorder. And for my inner eye, I saw a “mind” filled up with nontangible “things”: ideas, projects, to-do lists, places, relationships, dreams, and identities.

A friend had remodeled and had, in the process of packing down a significant number of books, let go of the contents of a bookcase. “Without these books, I am not an academic any longer.” (I silently thanked Providence for having provided me with the www for doing my thesis studies. I just have a gazillion PDF journal articles to delete. Why do they still sit in my laptop decades later?) On setting books back on the shelves, another set of books, previously used for professional purposes, left my friend’s library. “Without these books, I am not… any longer. But then what am I?” I reassured my friend that being a good friend was not an insignificant contribution to the world. But I could so relate to the pain and confusion in the voice.

Recently, another friend, whom I have known for a number of years through my communication training work, wondered what I had done for a living. The question tells you how much previous parts of my life openly inform what I am doing now. At the same time, I wonder whether my ability to draw connections between things that are not usually connected stems from having not been specifically trained in “my field” earlier in my life. I have always worked with some aspect of how people solve problems – the processes – whether from a technological, a financial, an organizational, and now mainly the human-to-human perspective.

Can you read in the previous paragraph how I am not really ready to let go of those earlier parts of my identity? I can.

And frankly, writing this piece is probably the shortest and most concise description of my meandering professional development that I have ever come up with. But would I like to go back and fill similar roles in an organization? Over my dead body.

I think my reluctance to letting go is related to the same conundrum that my friend voiced: “Who am I when I am not my profession?” I will twist the question slightly to “How am I seen by people around me if not through my professional identity?” And I know all too well the answer to that question from experiences during my first years living in the US when I wasn’t allowed to work and thus couldn’t serve some transactional purpose for the one asking what I did for a living: I was somebody you didn’t waste your time on. (I must have been involved with a different kind of people back then.)

Should somebody ask like that today, I might answer that I reteach people the things they learned in preschool: be kind, don’t fight, share, don’t lie, say thank you and please, (and wash your hands when you have used the bathroom.) Several identities ago I was asked whether I was a preschool teacher because I was good at making the questioner’s newborn grandson stop fussing. And back then, in my little competitive ego, I was so offended that anybody would think I focused on something as menial as soft skills. Oh, the irony of that.

Now I will ponder what Andee really meant by “paying respect to our past.” Probably something completely different. I seem to adjust my lens to focus first through my pain points. Wonder about that, too.

Thank you for provoking me, Andee, I gained more clarity for myself. And wasn’t that the main purpose?