What Am I?

A colleague was telling me yesterday just how annoyed he was at being described as "an epileptic". He does suffer from epilepsy, but he was extremely cross at that one feature of who he is being used in effect to define or pigeonhole him. It's easy to stereotype, to stick labels onto people based on one or two things we know about them, and then to use those labels as though they were all that needed to be said. We write people in or out as acceptable or not to us, based on such things as what clothes they wear, what accent they speak in, the way they vote, or the size of their waistband.

In reality we're all much more complex than that, but we will only find this out when we really listen to the other person, when we devote time to them, when we are prepared to take interest. People who come into contact with one part of my life are likely to see me very differently from those who only ever meet me or work with me somewhere else. I was talking music for an hour or more the other day with someone, a very competent pianist, who I know plays golf regularly with a guy I sing with; at the next choir practice I mentioned this to my singing colleague, who was surprised to discover that his golfing friend had an interest in music - it wasn't something that had had intruded on their days out on the golf course.

What am I? My last few months of enforced semi-idleness have, I suppose, required me to reflect on that basic question as a matter of some urgency. As the incumbent of a group of busy parishes I had an identity and status that now belongs to someone else. What did losing that leave me with? For it's true that, to a degree, we adapt and model ourselves to fit in with what other people see in us and expect of us; we conform to their stereotypes. Maybe that's part of what so annoyed my colleague yesterday: there's a sense in which, as people label us they also expect us to conform with that label, to fit in with the image they've required of us. Those who don't do that get labelled in another way - as 'difficult', as non-conformists, non-joiners, people who rock the boat. Since most of us actually do want to please others and be approved of, there is a real pressure to do the right thing and to fit in.

Well, I don't know where I fit in just now . . . and I'm not at all sorry to be in this place. For some people, retirement, whether planned or enforced, is a scary thing because so much of the self that has been built up and modelled and formed through the working years has now been lost, and the question "Who am I now?" is hard to deal with. For others, though, it's liberation; I can be who I want to be, and who those closest and dearest to me want and need me to be. And in this week of decisions, that's actually very good ground on which to be standing!