Notes on Identity and Creating a Self Outside Productivity
by Yatika Singh
It was my first semester at university when the question arose, innocuously, over what I remember as an otherwise unremarkable conversation.
“So, what are your hobbies?”
They showed me their handpainted collection of miniature figurines, waiting for my response. I said I liked to read, which was true — or had been true — before I had quietly stopped picking up my ongoing book for longer than I could comfortably admit. Reading was a hobby, but I had not finished a book in the last six months.
“But what are your interests outside of that? Like, cooking, writing poetry, something?” I said I mostly just liked books. The conversation left a sour taste in my mouth, not because it was unkind, but because of how consequential that question would turn out to be for the rest of that first semester. That day, on the walk home, I retrieved a memory of my pre-teen self going to weekend art classes with Mr. LB. They were the most joyful hours I had outside of school, that and Kathak.
Then I remembered grade six, freshly arrived at boarding school, hearing an announcement calling for ‘art kids’ to help create materials for a school event, and telling myself quietly: “I don’t really do art. Even if I do, it’s not as great as the others.” There was no proof of this. It was just a direct consequence of a label I had somewhere allowed to be fastened onto me, “not somebody who ‘did’ art”, and I had reorganised myself around it without questioning it once. Somewhere between ten and twelve, I began to find my creative self unreliable — I went from being an excited kid in my weekend art class who couldn’t wait to graduate from acrylic painting to oil pastels to sketching anatomy, to shying away from producing something worth hanging on a dorm noticeboard. This distance only increased over the course of high school.
I had not noticed this happening because I was too busy building the other version of myself, the legible one. This is probably a relatable image for some readers: by the end of high school, priorities had narrowed down to three items: finding the right college, earning the right grades, and distinguishing myself through extracurriculars, which were incidentally and almost immediately translated into CV lines and application essays. Our increasingly competitive culture makes this feel not only reasonable but necessary; increasingly, the question we ask each other at parties, at orientation weeks, at every new beginning, is not who are you but what do you do; and the answer is always a job title, a degree or a firm name. I forgot how to answer these questions without reaching out for these heuristics myself. Besides, how do we reconcile the doing with the being, especially when so many of us are on paths that divorce the two every day?
By the time I arrived at university, I had turned a lot of my interests and passions into neat metrics, and allowing myself to simply spill over as a human being had become genuinely difficult. Everyone around me seemed to have something, something they spent their weekends on for no other reason than that they loved it, something with no value to a resume that did not need any. I had forgotten what that felt like. More importantly, where was the room for play? Underneath the forgetting was a growing feeling I had started, quietly and then less quietly, to feed into: that I must create, produce something, do something that was not in service of anything except itself. I returned to my sketchbook, started scouring tarot wikis again, and re-introduced myself to journalling from time to time.
The people I find myself looking up to most, professionally and beyond, all have one thing in common, and it is that they have allowed themselves to remain large. Expansive personalities with expansive interests and an expansive curiosity that they followed into their work until the personal and the professional stopped being separate pursuits at all. Their best work is highly personalised to themselves, their ideas, instead of an attempt to fit a culturally-dictated blueprint of acceptability. What enables them to keep creating and becoming is a capacity to ‘play’, which is often discussed online today as an antidote to linear capitalist ambition.
What I am trying to do now is orient myself towards making amateur attempts. I want to learn new crafts, make things with my hands, translating the many thoughts and ideas for art and writing in my head into the physical world. Sometimes all that entails is asking a question probing enough for a week’s worth of rumination (illumination?) and bidding my honesty and courage to the answer – the making and the discovering and the finding of it all:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
Le Dragon Déchaîné 