Amy Parrish (00:44)
Hi, welcome back to rebelling. This is Amy. And today I want to talk about belonging again. But what I really want to talk about is how identity is part of belonging and

What got me thinking about this was a few articles that I read over the course of the past week, which I'll link in the show notes for y'all. And it reminded me of what my dad used to say to me when he was upset with me. He would ask me, who do you think you are?

And it wasn't a question. It was more like a warning. It was more like...

a demand to check myself and to check in with who I thought I was trying to be.

And at the time I was a teenager, I don't know who was I trying to be. I had no clue. I was trying to be basically accepted and I didn't get a lot of information about how to do that.

And I didn't understand how to do that. And so identity for me has been something that has been a struggle my whole life. Because if I take ownership of an identity, then someone can tell me I'm not enough of that thing to claim it.

And that made me think about how belonging is, where do I fit and do I belong anywhere? And that's, ⁓ it's negotiating with the outside world. And identity asks, who am I? finding clarity in my inner.

something I really can't shake is how we learn who we are and how to fit as children. And I'm so curious about how the things we learn as kids influence us for the rest of our lives. It's about how our minds and their function as prediction machines, they hold onto identities that don't make sense anymore.

And then also that we are socially encouraged to have these fixed identities like gender, personality, sexuality, ability, ⁓ preferences, our appearance. All these things are supposed to stay the same. Diagnosis.

we get told who we are and what we're allowed to be from such an early age. And then identity can become a performance. we.

The performance, the roles and the labels and expectations come from outside of us.

And so when my dad asked me, who do you think you are?

I didn't know what to say except for I'm me.

And that wasn't a good enough answer for him.

I have carried the label drama queen from the time I was very small.

And this label has been part of my identity, as long as I can remember.

When I was little, would get really upset and be inconsolable. And I would get sent to my room. And then I would write notes to my parents and throw them down the stairs and stand at the top of the stairs and say, there's a note for you at the bottom of the stairs.

Oh my god, I was just like, I just needed someone to tell me I was okay.

from the outside, it was dramatic. my parents teased me about how sensitive I was, how dramatic I was.

And that identity is still part of my life today at 54 years old.

My mom still calls me her little drama queen.

And it's interesting how.

hard identities can be to shake.

but also that maybe she calls me that because...

It reminds her of me being little.

And so that makes me wonder how like identities are hard to shake, but they are also shared.

It can feel dangerous to share an identity. It can feel empowering to claim one. And I read three articles this week that really got me thinking about the identities we claim.

and I'll link them in the show notes. The first one was ⁓ by BJ Ferguson.

Amy Parrish (06:37)
I got it as a guest post on the Spiral Lab Marta Roses substack, but it was actually posted in January. And in it,

The author critiques the term neurotypical for reinforcing the binary between normal and abnormal.

And it was really interesting to think about the fact that something that I want to call myself neurodivergent as a claim to an identity that is important to me.

that the other side of that

it still makes it like there's a correct brain type. Like just in its opposite, it's fulfilling the idea that there's a right kind of brain or a default kind of brain.

And it also,

It makes it like there's

There's.

There's no...

Like there's no shared experience between neurotypicals and neurodivergent folks. Like there is.

And they talk about moving away from that binary thinking and having a more relational context based view of human experience.

And my therapist and I talk about this all the time, how limiting binaries are.

So it's interesting to have read this person talking about challenging the rigidity of identity language.

And it made me think about how identities are more like a skeleton.

that they can be a structure we can rely on to help us know who we are, but they don't have to tell the whole story.

Amy Parrish (08:48)
The second article I read is by Aisha Khan on cosmic anarchy, also on Substack, and it's called, Psychiatric Diagnoses and Bioessentialism Will Not Liberate Us.

She also doesn't believe that the neurodivergent neurotypical binary exists. she says, decolonizing to me and to many of us has involved questioning the whole premise and foundation of these identity labels and categories.

She asks us to go beyond our labels.

and to see that there's other ways for us to make sense of ourselves without labels.

And it's interesting to me because she says that the more that she felt anchored into the collective, the less attached she was to even radical labels.

She questions how our labels, how our claimed identities.

are ways that we try to make ourselves more understandable and more palatable.

and that maybe we can honor our multitudes.

And I love this quote. She says, we are combating colonialism simply by refusing to be made comprehensible through a narrow lens that is foreign to us. In the process, we are pushing people to delve beyond these levels or to defy, shift, stretch, bend, morph, queer these labels into something that no longer resemble.

the bio-essentialist oppressive foundations they were founded on.

Amy Parrish (11:00)
bio-essentialism, which is the belief that mental and emotional differences are rooted in unchangeable biological flaws or disorders.

when we do that, it reduces complex human experiences to static medical categories.

and that diagnoses can be useful and even life saving, but they also limit the personhood of those being diagnosed.

So again, another call for

contextual person-centered approaches.

Identity is supportive, but it's not defining.

And so you can see yourself as more than an identity, but also as a way to have a name for your experience.

The third article that I read was by Lovett Jallow and

It was called neurodivergence in ancient Africa, a reclamation of identity.

What I appreciated about this article was how

She talks about.

neurodivergence as integrated into African societies and how diagnosis is a modern Western lens that ignores non-Western wisdom and historical neurodivergent roles.

It's, it's, what I got from it is remember who you were before they told you something was wrong with you.

And so with those three articles.

It really got me thinking about, I mean, I'll tell you, I read the first couple and I was like, I need to get the word neurodivergent off of my website. This feels, ⁓

doesn't feel like I want it to feel. It feels like I'm leaning into defining myself according to a colonialist capitalist system that I don't believe in. And I was really glad that I got to the third article because it gave me room.

to remember why identity is important.

Amy Parrish (13:38)
And so each one of those things that I read come together to hand me an idea about identity formed by BJ Ferguson saying, don't get boxed in by the binaries. Aisha Khan questioning the systems that were built to control the way we identify ourselves.

And Lovette Jallow saying, Hey, remember who you were before someone told you who you are.

Amy Parrish (14:19)
Remember who you were before someone told you who you are.

And it created for me this full circle.

idea of.

Identity.

and that it's not something we have to get rid of, it's something we have to take charge of. Identity is a skeleton. It is supportive. It's not fixed. It can grow. It can heal. It can break. It can realign.

Identity helps us find each other.

It creates kinship.

It can create a sense of safety.

It can create a point of view, an inner authority.

It can be a place of curiosity, not fixed, movable, not exclusive, inclusive.

This all makes me think about rebelling against the settler colonizer ways of labeling the world.

and words matter.

And as a white person, feel like so much of the struggle we have in America is that we created an identity that has.

a backbone of individualism, destruction, and domination. And that is not an identity. It's an erasure.

I also feel like for me as a white person, identity is important to pay attention to because...

Without it, we have lost our way.

And in our quest to get to the top of the mountain of whiteness, we've lost the ability to commune.

And it's important to find that in ways that are human and natural.

I often feel like I'm living the story, the Emperor's New Clothes.

and I long for something to attach to, to grow into and from.

Amy Parrish (16:30)
identities not based in colonialism.

Amy Parrish (16:34)
traditions that aren't based in capitalism, rituals that aren't born out of economics.

but songs and stories and dances and movements that are handed down.

silences that hold the holiness of our place in the natural world.

Identity can be something that brings people together and tears us apart.

Identity can be a weapon.

And just like my dad used to ask me, who do you think you are?

Society does that too.

And that's really hard.

and confusing and upsetting.

and isolating.

and I'm going to change gears here.

When I was diagnosed with ADHD and then...

They felt like identities I could get behind.

In those identities, I found myself.

And now from reading these articles, I find a deeper self.

It was interesting to watch myself scurry and try to be able to represent myself with the right identity.

the one that would come across that would help people understand who I am and that I'm not doing anything wrong.

And it really made me recognize that sometimes to learn and be in the liminal space of leaving behind.

ideas about identity and embracing different ones that might raise more eyebrows but create the sense of emergence I long for in my own understanding of the world.

I went into a tizzy when I read those things because I want to be saying and doing the right things. I want to be a person who is seen as understanding. And it took me a couple of days to understand that I have to be in the uncertainty and not knowing to fully embrace the growth of identity and that it is not fixed.

Our labels can help us find one another. And they can also be dismissive.

What emerges for me is that

being willing to do the work of getting to know someone, of taking the time.

to do that.

Identity is a way in.

It's a way that we find each other. It's a way that we tell each other who we are before we...

get to know one another.

but it's not an assumption it's not an absolute.

I feel like we have a lot to learn about how identities shape our lives. And as a white American, I long for the comfort of a culture that is built on life-sustaining approaches rather than erasure.

I want identities I can be proud of.

And in that longing is the courage it takes to extend a longer view.

and to know that I have a lot.

A lot to learn.

I want to be more careful with my identities, more deliberate, and more flexible with the way I hold them. Who I claim myself to be identifies me. Words matter. I don't throw identities out lightly.

And the question, who do you think you are?

Just like, why can't I just?

It changes the way you ask it.

And who do you think you are? When it becomes, who do you think you are? It's a question that has weight. Identity is a becoming. It's a response and a responsibility.

One of the ways that I'm trying to learn to increase my perspective is to do both trusting my instincts and also questioning them. And so when I felt like I had to have the right identity language on my website, I for it forgets that I'm alive. I'm complex. I'm learning to tell when I'm upholding the identities of colonialist capitalist culture

putting them down because I do not believe in them even though they do exist.

I can live my way into that knowing. And right now, I don't have to make declarations because my identity isn't that. It almost feels like by declaring it, I'd stop it from living. Who I am, what I call myself. I just don't know right now what feels like me.

Calling myself AuDHD and neurodivergent felt so cozy until I learned more and now they feel constricting and like they have a history much longer than the one I was learning.

I don't want to lose the space of those identities. And I also don't want to justify my existence.

So I'm going to be careful and thoughtful. And I'm going to admit to you my confusion.

And I want to remember that words on a website might tell you.

My identity?

but it's my...

It's my...

It's me who tells you who I am.

And so.

As we think about identity and what they mean and the things that we call ourselves.

ADHD, gifted, neurodivergent, queer, sober.

Mother. Friend.

writer

Identities can help us belong.

and identities are an open.

an open call to question.

and also be reassured.

and the way that I want to rebel.

is to not.

Let my identity be.

something I'm afraid of.

something I'm ashamed of.

For me, true rebellion is not rejecting others' It's the ongoing and courageous act of being willing to define myself on my own terms.

And so.

What if identity is like a skeleton? Strong enough to support you, but flexible enough to grow.

What if it provides safety without confinement and connection without limitation?

Identity isn't something you discover once and claim forever.

It's continuous unfolding, a process of becoming rather than a state of being.

And that's the beauty of self-definition. It's not all about rejection of structure and community. It's about knowing what frameworks support you alive and which ones constrain it.

Something changed for me when I gave myself the permission to identify openly as neurodivergent.

It gave me...

so much relief and made me feel for the first time like I was part of something.

And maybe there are better words for it. And maybe there are better ways to say it.

And I want to keep learning and growing.

But sometimes...

I just don't want to have to justify my existence.

And I don't

I've been thinking about how to end this in a way that feels like an ending. And I don't really have one because I don't think there's an ending. I think it's a complicated, complex conversation and that identities and the ones we claim are the ways that we connect with each other. And it's always evolving. And so I,

I don't have a neat bow. I don't have a neat ending.

But I do know that when my dad asked me, who do you think you are?

all those years ago, what I said was me.

I'm me.

And that's who I think I am today.

So that did actually have a little wrap up.

Thank you so much for listening. I'm really trying to ⁓ just hold a space of curiosity and ⁓ thinking about things in different ways, which is really hard and sometimes feels very confusing. And ⁓ so I hope that

I hope some of this helped you think or gave you an idea about yourself. And yeah, I'm going to just say thanks for listening and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes next.