Who am I– For My Sake and Others’?
By Padma Shandas
Self-identity is a tricky bird. Try to corner it, and you may end up chasing wild geese. If you are lucky, you may get a floating feather.
Try to imagine, for a moment, how Gregor Samsa would have felt one morning when he discovered that he had become an enormous cockroach with many legs. I am certain we can all imagine the young man’s predicament in the frighteningly realistic story, The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, published in 1915. Feeling powerless, not knowing what to do or where to turn, the gnawing emptiness inside, is a terrifying experience.
American psychologist Dr. Rollo May wrote about loneliness, emptiness and anxiety as the three problems of modern man, in his book, Man’s Search for Himself[1]. We are quite familiar with temporary anxiety, the sweaty palms and the palpitating heart, the classic symptoms of stage fright.
But in today’s globalized life, especially in the post-September 11 era, we feel more anxious than ever before. Our anxiety spreads into more and more aspects of our daily living. Even high-technology and the million gadgets are not helping us yet. We try to be in constant contact with others, in continual vigilance. There is a ceaseless chatter in our ears. It is ironic that we are trying to ward off some of our anxiety by being alert 24 hours a day! We are afraid to turn off the cell phone or the email, as though the ensuing silence would trigger our primordial aloneness. We are inching toward a perpetual state of anxiety.
In the case of immigrants, the situation can only be worse. We bear the additional burden of what I like to call ‘cultural anxiety.’ It is a gnawing perplexity that combines a feeling of ‘cultural loneliness’ and ‘cultural emptiness.’ I am sure those who have experienced them would know what I mean. Do we see a plethora of cultural organizations around us? By joining them with other like-minded people, speaking the same language, we hope to overcome some of the loneliness. Perhaps for a while it would help. But what happens when we come out to the ‘real world?’
Questions like, ‘who am I?’ or ‘what do I truly want?’ or ‘what is my passion?’ continue to harass you if you are even minimally introspective. These questions may never bother you as a South Asian living in the home country, because there are clear cultural guidelines that you follow, even without thinking about them. The answers become critical in a country like America. Here we live with a strange feeling of cultural emptiness. There are no roots to lean back on, no home-brand tradition to steady you, no clear answers to questions about one’s identity.
So you begin to search for yourself in others. One day they make you feel you are the character Gregor Samsa, and you would want to crawl out of here any moment. But the next, you may feel as though you just ate a bit of the moon, out-of-this-world, radiating cool light. The conflicts begin. Anxiety rises. One answer pulls you in one direction while another pushes you toward the opposite. Besides your skin color, your clothes, your manner of speaking, all of which define you for other people, you begin to wonder about your own self-identity. You struggle with the idea of who you should be.
What do I really want? Should I go beyond my nationality, religion and language to understand that? Where do I start? The answers do not seem to come overnight, nor can one get them from friends or at the library. They have to come from inside each person. Rollo May suggests, to reduce our anxiety, we should improve our self-awareness and affirm our sources of strength. The more we know about ourselves, the better are the chances we can deal with our anxieties. ‘Know thyself’ is an old proverb.
In Kafka’s story, the cockroach finally dies, its body swept off with a broom. People carry on with their lives, as though Gregor Samsa never existed. Is there anything scarier than this image?
Padma Shandas is the author of Spices in the Melting Pot—Life Stories of Exceptional South Asian Immigrant Women.