Identity in Isolation
this is an essay I wrote in May of 2020
It’s funny how easily sudden misfortune can be reframed as beneficial. I was catching up with a friend on the phone for the first time since we were abruptly separated in the midst of our final college semester. He mentioned “how thrilled” he was to be in quarantine away from others; he found it not boring but exhilarating to be stuck by himself, a fantastic opportunity to return to who he “really was”. In the frenzied social pace of college, he claimed he had lost track of some type of authenticity, a natural state that could only come from isolation.
On one hand, I understood where he was coming from. Social distancing, while limiting one’s mobility, has presented many with an interesting opportunity to decide who they are based on what they do with their huge swaths of time while alone. On the other hand, I believe this “natural state” perspective—that isolation gives us the time to return to our authentic personalities—obscures the real nature of identity. We are not our real singular “self” when we think we’re alone, because we’re never alone; we are always living in relation to each other. We have many shifting and co-dependent identities. Quarantine is a unique opportunity to grow more in tune with these identities and more intentional about how the networks we keep shape who we are.
The communal contexts we exist within give form to who we are and who we become. This has been the most evident to me in my studies of jazz. I’ve spent the past year and a half studying how jazz musicians in the forties and fifties understood themselves in a time when black identity was constantly shifting. I found that the answer to this question had little to do with the individuals themselves and more to do with the networks they kept. The networks jazz artists placed themselves within, whether on the bandstand or in the jam session, were the source of both social and musical instruction. Charlie Parker’s failures on the bandstand in groups as a youth would eventually become the origin of his future success: embarrassed that he couldn’t play a song in more than one key, he resolved to learn all twelve keys, giving him a mastery that gave way to a new musical identity. He was no longer little Charlie Parker—when it came to playing on the bandstand, he was respected with the title “Yardbird” as a saxophone prodigy. When he finally found success and recognition within these jazz groups, Parker was able to add an achieved identity—Yardbird—to his preexisting identity. Parker viewed this new side of himself as significant enough for him to name one of his most famous compositions, “Ornithology”, an homage to his nickname and musical persona. By day he could be family-man Charlie Parker, but in the musical community, he gained the freedom to lean into his personality as a musical maestro.
The shaping that occurs within these communities is not even limited by spatial distance. Even in the most extreme circumstances of social and psychological deprivations, our communities come to define us. Heda Kovaly, a memoirist and survivor of the Holocaust, recounted her time in concentration camps under the Nazi regime. While the conditions were grueling beyond belief, she remarked on how the Communist prisoners were always the ones most admired in the camps. The reason was that even in the face of death in isolation, the Communists were unafraid because they were members of a movement. There is power that comes from locating your identity within a broader constellation of individuals, even when such networks are not within physical reach.
Trapped inside, many people have been experimenting with many achievable identities through communities. Some of my friends have taken up group morning yoga calls on Skype while others have picked up bread baking, posting their creations on Instagram whenever possible. The rise of applications like Zoom—despite its many flaws—have made it easier than ever to create communities across time and space. I recently joined a book club via Zoom that has met three times in the past month. Even if one’s activities aren’t explicit forms of self-care, the increased levels of social isolation make it easier to notice who we are at home, who we are in public, and who project ourselves to be.
Daily life before quarantine made it difficult for us to meaningfully ground our identities in our communities. Nietzsche described the “glorification” and “tireless talk” about work and other trappings of daily life as dangerous to our ability to reflect on ourselves and our lives. Running from one goal to another, day by day, we rarely took the time to acknowledge our many identities or the groups that shaped them. In our current isolation, this lack of awareness no longer has to be the norm.
Finding a true authenticity in isolation is a myth. Now is a unique chance to become more in tune with our inner constellation of characters and the strength that they provide.