Identity

Congratulations to my daughter Alex who has today passed through one of the many great British rites of passage - finding out exam results. I typed 'opening' first off, but then realised that it no longer involves a dreaded envelope, now it means looking at a website. She gained the grades she needed to go to Goldsmith's College, University of London and damn fine grades they are too and well deserved.

Identity and University have been pre-occupying me recently. One of the suggestions from my own London University college, King's, was that in lieu of a transcript, I should find the syllabus for my course from the department's website. Fine and dandy - well not really - but the syllabus has changed quite considerably, in that when I did my MA, there was a very heavy emphasis on Psychology, whereas that doesn't seem to figure at all on the current scheme.
We learned about Cognitive Psychology and about motivation and identity, I remember that. I have now sent an actual letter on paper to the registrar, they have let me down, not because I feel they should have to provide transcripts - which incidentally means a summary of all the marks you gained - but because they say they do and they don't.

Identity. We start life not knowing the difference between ourselves and the world around us and the developmental step that is every bit as big as the physical parturition of birth, is that of discovering that the world and we are separate things.
Our identity has a huge growth spurt in adolescence. Others who are not our caregivers become essential to our sense of self, and we kick against our parents. We turn into Harry Enfield's Kevin and Perry while our individuality develops rapidly. In some ways it's an absolute nightmare to teach pupils in this phase of their lives, in others, a real privilege.

Then the rites of the society we live in help to form us, rites like exams, jobs, skills acquired, religion, significant events in our lives, death, birth, love, loss and although the strongest of these can change us, we never again develop as quickly as we do during adolescence.

But then the pendulum swings. I don't know if much has been written about this, I'm certainly aware that the 'mid-life crisis' is an oft-documented phenomenon, but what about the loss of identity that can occur in middle-age? I was aware of it before coming here, but I think that exacerbated by the transition pains of immigration it is something I feel intensely now.

The disappearance one experiences at mid-life is not always a bad thing. I am reminded of this when out with my daughter. I really don't miss the unwanted male attentions of younger years, I don't even mind the feeling of being invisible a lot of the time, but sometimes I do. Sometimes I resent the invisibility of middle-age.

I ask myself who I am. I do this a lot. When you are younger and know absolutely who you are, this question rarely occurs.
I used to be able to say,
'I am a teacher, a manager, a mother, a sister, a daughter, a partner, a friend, a cyclist, a linguist, a philosopher, a reader, a gardener, a theatre-goer, a film-lover, I live by the sea and that's part of me, and I have degrees,'
But some of those roles have been taken from me by life and some by my move. I am no longer a daughter or a teacher or a manager. I no longer cycle very much. My language skills grow rusty from disuse, my degrees are recognised but useless to me.
But I can get to the sea and I still feel it's part of me and I grow my tomato forest. I am still a partner and a sister, I am still a mother, a grandmother too, but as my own children grow up and become more independent, that role becomes less immediate.

Now I am British to an extent that I never was before. Only now, away from what I am used to, I have become an oddity, a stranger, an exile.
I seek out and am sought by other Brits here so that we can hang on to some of what we knew, what we were.
Many people here are enchanted by Britain and the British, others are passive-aggressive towards Brits, there are those who feel we think we're better than them, projection of a pre-existing unwarranted sense of inferiority.
Some just see it as just part of who someone is, no more than an accent.

And I am a woman. I feel more of a woman now, in middle-age than I ever did when younger. I don't any longer think of being a woman as something relating to a man. 'I am a woman because I get lots of attention from men.'
No, now I am really a woman. I value my women friends and relatives so much more than I ever did in the distractedness of youth.

But it's a hard process. It's not as intense as adolescence, nor so filled with hope and expectancy, but there are as many tears and as much depression. Developing identity is something that happens whether you want it to or not. Losing it is something to fight against.

Or maybe I never existed at all.