On Identity

17 min readNov 11, 2024

During a series of interviews she gave to the University of Kentucky in the late seventies, Elizabeth Hardwick said that “Only fools identify themselves with a place.” When I first read this, in an essay in the NYRB about Hardwick’s life, I found myself rather — well, the word I want to use here is aghast, but somehow that’s not right, until I double check that indeed aghast need not mean full of horror, but simply full of shock, which I most certainly was, filled, that is, and so aghast it would seem is right, or rather, was. For I no longer feel this sense of shock at this statement, if only because I’ve repeated it so many times in my vain attempts to justify one of the many very unpopular opinions I have on the topic of identity — or perhaps my overarchingly unpopular opinion on identity, i.e. that it doesn’t exist (this is a nihilism thing, not a disenfranchising or Republican one) — but if we stick to the opinion at hand, that place per se is not a concept that is useful for developing one’s identity, we, or at least I, must reckon with the fact that holding this opinion, which is to say agreeing with Hardwick’s statement, makes me an inveterate hypocrite.

For to this day, when people ask me where I’m from, I say, “I grew up in Florida.” To claim to be from somewhere doesn’t make any sense, for as Flannery O’Connor said: “Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place.”[1] Besides, what I want to tell them, that I’m from Afghanistan, would likely not be well received. This doesn’t make it any less true. The I that now exists, the I who became a physician, the I who can’t help but know that so much of the world depends on violence, the I who still dreams in Dari… Where else could I have come from? Where else could I be from?

And so it would seem that the entirety of my being, or at least if not the complete entirety, then a very large part or parts, has long been, and to a major extent still is, defined by a place. But perhaps this can be useful, my hypocrisy, for as André Malraux told us: “man can never plumb the depths of his own being; his image is not to be discovered in the extent of the knowledge he acquires but in the questions he asks.”[2]

So then it sounds like we should ask a different question, or questions, no? But before we do so, I have to acknowledge something. I am completely aware that my ability to even hold the opinion that identity does not exist is, for lack of a better word, a privileged one. It is only because my identity as a white man is the best identity one can have in our modern society that I am afforded the luxury of not thinking about it, or of telling myself that I don’t think about it, which is, of course, a lie. Because if it were true that I don’t think about it, this essay wouldn’t exist.

In the next few thousand words, I’m going to drop a lot of names, refer to many artists, and quote a lot of people much smarter than me. Every one of the references stems from the reading I’ve done over the last few years, during which I have religiously taken notes of lines and ideas that stuck out to me, and compiled these notes in an ongoing document. A few months ago, I found myself thinking about identity, and what it might mean to be an American, and a veteran, and so I went back to my notes, and looked for every idea that might be related to identity and, lo and behold, for someone who doesn’t think identity exists, I found an awful lot of notes. So while I have a couple of questions I want us to keep in mind, also know that much of this essay is my attempt to share with you a survey of what others have said about this topic, and to show you some of my thoughts along the way.

As for those questions I promised, here they are: Is being defined by something the same as identifying with it? Or, conversely, does identity offer us definition?

In A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand’s brilliant disquisition on the idea of ‘being’ in the black diaspora, she writes that “Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary. This is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are essentially coercive and indifferent.”[3] I don’t know that they were nurturing, but certainly my origins were (are?) coercive and indifferent. Growing up poor and religious in the rural South of these our ‘United’ States has long been a coercive existence, one that confines you to a life of penury, racism, and mis — or even, these days, dyseducation. Certainly, I was defined by these things, and most certainly did I identify with them, consciously or not.

For what was a poor, evangelical Christian boy from Lake City, Florida, to do with his life? When I didn’t get into college, the answer appeared to be to continue doing what I’d done throughout high school: waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant, playing video games, ruining my health, and generally succumbing to the notion of my origins.

But then I remembered a story I had been told, one of the great myths of America, that there was an organization that didn’t care about your origins, and was uninterested in your identity (allegedly, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell being the U.S. government’s weak attempt at indifference to queerness). And, based on what the recruiter in my 10th grade American History class had said, if you were able and willing, this organization would happily take you from whence you came, and if you were extra-able, they’d even teach you a ‘foreign’ language, and let you fly around in giant spy planes, helping to save the world (or at least the world’s hegemony).

And so, I enlisted in the United States Air Force in order to become an airborne cryptologic linguist. Talk about a new identity, huh? Talk about a new definition. Airman, flyboy, someone worthy of being thanked for their service (never mind the fact that this someone had committed no acts of service, nor were sure that they ever would). Flash forward a few years and I have learned two languages, Dari, and Pashto, and gone through basic training, survival school, and flight training. With all of this, not only have I solidified this new identity, but I’ve even been bequeathed a title for that identity, that of a United States Air Force Special Operations Command Direct Support Operator (I know, right?), trained to fly onboard a plane known as The Angel of Death to us, and as the bogeyman to the Taliban, ready to go on my first deployment in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, fully ready to do my service as a patriot, to “kill people and break their shit.” Let me tell you, Montaigne was right: “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself.”[4]

And so, this I did. Belong, that is. My first mission in Afghanistan, one hundred Taliban were killed, alongside six Americans. I didn’t kill anyone, on either side, but I did watch many of them die. This mission was in line with my identity, in that the Taliban had attacked a Forward Operating Base full of innocent American soldiers, who were simply minding their own business, trying to help make Afghanistan a better place. [I am, now, aware of the contradiction in these two efforts. Suffice it to say that I, then, was not.]

I continued to live this identity, flying missions where sometimes people died, and sometimes Taliban died [Taliban ≠ people in this identity], but most of the time very little of importance happened, and no one died. I spent dozens, and eventually hundreds of hours listening to people, and to Taliban, talk. I listened to their stories, which is to say that I listened to their lives — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise, a story is a life, whole and wondrous. And as I listened I learned, and I changed, I suppose, but not enough that it mattered, which is to say not enough that I noticed it.

But then I flew a different sort of mission.

During that mission — this mission? — , I killed two Taliban. I, and the crew of the plane I was flying with, fired a missile that landed between the Taliban’s bodies, and I listened to their last words, celebrating the fact that they had just shot the American soldier I was trying to help protect, and I simultaneously listened to that soldier howl as he was shot, and I watched as Parmenides was proved wrong, for you can, in fact, create nothing, or at least turn something — those two Taliban — and maybe even someones — those two people — into nothing.

It would be nice to be able to tell you that in that same moment my identity was also destroyed, or, indeed, that I was brave enough to destroy it. This is, however, not the case. This is likely for the best, insofar as I’m still alive today, as I pretty firmly believe that to outright destroy one’s identity would necessitate killing oneself. (Whether my living is a net positive, is, of course, up for debate, but let us be generous to ourselves). My identity was threatened though, along with my place in the system that created it. But I kept flying, simply because this was what one did: you kept flying until the day comes when you have to choose between life and death. Yours, or yours.

And so I finished my deployment and I returned to America, though I did not come home. (I didn’t know it then, but Ella Winter was right when she said You Can’t Go Home Again.[5]) I was still myself, or so I thought, perhaps if only because I hadn’t yet read Forrest Gardner, who knew long before I did that “I gave my life to strangers; I kept it from the ones I loved.”[6] Despite the damage of my Mission, despite the fact that my identity was now ambiguous, I could still be certain of my title, a decent surrogate for an identity. Titles are convenient that way, and by their convenience, they are powerful. A bit like origins — arbitrary, nurturing (?), coercive — though certainly they are not identical to our origins, for no title is indifferent. And, like all surrogates, they can be misleading in their inexactitude.

For while I was still a linguist, the meaning of that title, the definition of it, was not meant to include the new identity — that of a human — that I was gaining alongside it. This, it now seems to me, is fairly silly, for it seems all but impossible to learn another language without, if not outright gaining a new identity, then at least changing the one you started with. (The military (and most other large organizations) will likely always face this problem when it comes to education, as they are interested in making you a cog in their machinery, but educated cogs have this nasty habit of not quite fitting in.)

In The Fire Next Time Baldwin offers an explanation for why people do this, this active ignoring of their identities, that I think applies just as well to many organizations: “Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”[7] The military, and most other large organizations — and let us not forget that nations are simply very large organizations — are obligated to engage in this act of guarding and keeping in order to justify their existences. For outside their system of reality, what purpose might they serve, what role would they play? They may well have to admit that Henry Miller was right, and that “It doesn’t exist, America. It’s a name you give to an abstract idea.”[8]

But then, what if Nietzsche was right, too, (gasp, I know) and it isn’t just a matter of an incorrect supposition, a la Baldwin, but also a simple lack of knowledge: “What we do in dreams we also do when we are awake: we invent and fabricate the person with whom we associate — and immediately forget we have done so.”[9] This, it seems to me, is a very Nietzschean way of saying that we are all simply trying to find ourselves: I, with no small amount of help from the Air Force, had certainly invented and fabricated this new person that I was, all along forgetting that I/we had done so, all along claiming that it, and therefore I, was real, and true. And I don’t think it’s unfair to say that our young nation, and our even younger Air Force, was doing much the same.

But I don’t know that Nietzsche had it quite right (phew, I know), because in order to find one’s new self, it seems to me that one must not merely forget, but instead one must lose one’s former self [let us just accept that I’m a filthy Kantian and this is how change must be in my world], and, as Sharon Olds tell us, “Once you lose someone it is never exactly the same person who comes back.”[10]

And so I was not the same person when I deployed to Afghanistan the second time. I was, ironically, a real DSO, a tried-and-true linguist, one who others could, and even sometimes would put their faith in. I did more flying, more nothing, killed more Tal — but wait. With my nascent identity, that of a human, came, this time, far less certainty about what we were doing in Afghanistan. Or, rather, it was more certainty about what we were doing, but far, far less certainty that what we were doing was right. And then I flew another Mission where we killed some men working in a field.

We killed these men in broad daylight. There was no dark, comforting night to cover up our sins, no stars keeping watch over us, giving us their blessing. There was only the sun, and those men, and the missile we fired at them that didn’t explode as planned, such that one of them was only injured, so his friends loaded him into a car, and I listened as they called for help, desperately trying to save their friend, while we debated whether we would shoot them again. They didn’t make it very far before I listened to yet another man die, or at least until I heard his last breath come out of his friend’s mouth. Somehow, that was harder.

I finished that deployment too, if only so that one of my fellow linguists wouldn’t have to deploy early to replace me. Surely, it didn’t make sense to make someone else do what I no longer could. But my day had come, and I chose my life over my death. I told my bosses, which is to say I told the Air Force, that I would no longer do the thing they had trained me to do, which was to say that I would no longer kill people — or Taliban — for them. This was tantamount to treason, which is not an exaggeration, for I was threatened with the possibility of being court martialed for two charges that are part and parcel of treason, cowardice and malingering. They didn’t, charge me that is, for I wasn’t malingering, nor was I a coward, but I was a something, certainly.

Or was I? I was no longer able and willing to be a DSO, and while I had been given the opportunity to become a human, the nature of my work, the in- or maybe even ahumanity of it made me feel like more of a monster than a human. But more than anything, I felt like nothing. As the narrator in Anne Garréta’s Sphinx explains: “No, more likely I had exposed my own collapse, the ruin of the edifice I had so painfully constructed out of rhetoric and made to stand in for an identity… I was then forced to recognize what I had always secretly wanted others to discover: “I” is nothing…” “‘What am I’ I was asking myself, ‘other than what you do not know how to say about me?’”[11] These are not questions one asks when one is part of something as large and as in need of identity as the military.

Still, they tried to get me to answer this question, that of what I was. Foolish, to ask that of a 23-year-old, but there we were. There was truculence in my aversion, to be sure, but there was also a simple inability to answer, by virtue of not being able to name the thing they wanted. The problem was that, to my mind, like to Thomas Mann’s, “In the first place there was not the faintest need of calling it [whatever it is that I felt I was] anything; it could never be a subject of discussion; that would be out of place, and he [I] had no desire for it; and, in the second, giving a thing a name implies, if not passing judgment on it, at least defining it; that is to say, classifying it among the familiar and habitual; whereas Hans Castorp [Ian Fritz] was penetrated by the unconscious conviction that an inward good of this sort was above all to be guarded from definition and classification.”[12]

The one name that I did know, that of killer, most certainly passed judgment, and most certainly defined. And for a long time, like Brian Turner, I could see

The skeletons rest in their boxes

still slack-jawed twenty years later,

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as if amazed at their own deaths.

I want[ed] to lie down among them,

to be wrapped in sheets like the flags

of nations, banded in light and shadow.”[13]

It may only be 13 years later for me, but they’re still there, still slack-jawed, and while they still identify me as a killer, I don’t know if they define me as such. For I see them less often these days, these skeletons, or maybe the correct verb is look [at them, that is]. The obvious reason for this is time, which I admit has likely played a major role in my recovery from depression and PTSD. But I don’t know that time has healed my moral injury, if only because I think that a) moral injuries are a chronic sort of wound, ones where even the scar tissue can still hurt, and b) if moral injuries can be healed, there are only two treatments: art, and people.

In their essay Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through T. Fleischmann explained this far more elegantly than I can: “My relationship to who I was is tenuous. Is this true of all people? This is why it seems important to me that all people create, make art, practice their imaginations, exercise beauty. When we fill the world with artifacts of what we dreamed we begin to learn from who we wanted to be, an imagined people who might know enough to stop making the same mistakes.”[14] Art, be it engagement with or creation of, is the only act — don’t let anyone tell you otherwise art is action, beautiful and sublime — an individual can perform on their own that can bring about the catharsis — lest we forget, catharsis means purgation, not just release — that is needed for moral injuries to fully heal.

And even if you can’t see the value of art (I couldn’t, for a long time), there is that other treatment option, that of people. I don’t think that people are better or somehow more efficacious than art (if anything I tend to prefer art), but I do think they are more accessible. Whether they’re a therapist, a partner, a friend, perhaps even a stranger, all that matters is that they are another person who is willing and able to see you for who you are, sometimes in spite of, sometimes even with all of your injuries. And in that moment, they can accept you, which, as Qiu Maojin writes, amounts to negating your negation of yourself.[15]

For this is my main problem with identity: it is so often limiting, it so often allows you to negate your self. For years, all I was was a killer; my identity was limited to this one all-encompassing thing. I had these other titles, veteran, student, whatever, but lording over all of them was the one identity that mattered, for it had dictated, and therefore negated, all the rest of them. I wouldn’t be a veteran if I hadn’t killed (I would have stayed in, still been an airman), nor would I be a student (what would I have needed to learn?), nor would I be, really, much of anything else that I had become.

So, on the one hand, we could say that this identity, ironically, gave me life, insofar as it told me what I could do. On the other hand, we could just as easily say that it took my life, insofar as it told me what I had to do.

But you see — and I know this is hard to believe given all of my digressions and interjections — I’m a silly little reductionist. Fortunately, people much smarter than me have been kind enough to share their wisdom, and I’ve come to see as true what both a very clever friend of mine and the brilliant mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport said about identity: “genuine identification goes in concentric circles.”[16]

And as far as I’ve been able to sort, be it together or separate (though they’re far better together), it is only through, only with, art and people that we can create more circles. For it is only these two things that allow us to step outside of ourselves, which we must do to know ourselves. Don’t take my word for it, Stanley Cavell said as much in his magnum opus The Claim of Reason: “Knowing oneself is the ability to make oneself an other to oneself, to learn of oneself something one did not already know. Hence this is the focus at which the knowledge of oneself and of others meet. I should think a sensible axiom of the knowledge of persons would be this: that one can see others only to the extent that one can take oneself as an other.”[17]

Unfortunately, it has become harder and harder to see ourselves, and subsequently to see others. This isn’t an entirely new development; Hazlitt wrote about it in 1821: “I have sometimes thought whether the progress of society and march of knowledge does not do more harm in this respect, by loosening the ties of domestic attachment, and preventing those who are most interested in and anxious to think well of one another from feeling a cordial sympathy and approbation of each other’s sentiments, manners, views, etc., than it does good by any real advantage to the community at large.”[18] But the reason we, as Americans, can’t do this, is potentially new. Rapoport felt that the “process of expanding one’s circle of identification is impeded in the United States” by “our cult of competition (or ‘success’ or the ‘pursuit of happiness’) which declares itself constantly, persistently, unblushingly to be the very essence of ‘our way of life.’”[19] In ending, I would like to propose to you that the only thing worth competing with, or for, is life itself. I spent years competing with the Taliban, with death, and with my self, which is to say with ‘success’ and the ‘pursuit of happiness’, and I’m here to tell you that Rapoport was right; all this did was destroy my identity — hence that overarchingly unpopular opinion of mine. It has only been with art, and with people, that I have been given an identity, which is to say given a definition, which is to say given a life.

[1] Flannery O’Connor, Wise Blood, Pg. 84

[2] André Malraux, Anti-Memoirs, Pg. 6

[3] Dionne Brand, Map to the Door of No Return Pg. 64

[4] Michel de Montaigne, On Man

[5] Gail Godwin, You Can’t Go Home Again, xxi

[6] Forest Gardner, Be With, Pg. 11

[7] James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, Pg. 86

[8] Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn, Pg. 208

[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Pg. 101

[10] Sharon Olds, Satan Says, Pg. 28

[11] Anne Garréta, Sphinx, Pg. 89

[12] Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, Pg. 128