I recently came across an idea from the American cultural anthropologist and writer Ernest Becker that made me stop and think. Becker suggested that much of what we do as human beings is shaped by an uncomfortable fact: we know we are going to die. Unlike my cat and most other creatures, we can imagine our own death and understand that our lives, and the people we experience ourselves to be, are temporary.
Becker believed that we respond to this awareness by creating what he called a “hero system.” We build lives that give us a sense of significance. We become someone. We become a parent, a partner, a professional, a teacher, an artist, a businessperson. We create things, achieve things, contribute to communities and become part of something larger than ourselves. In doing so, we create a story that tells us that our life matters and that, in some way, something of us will continue beyond our physical existence.
There is nothing particularly wrong with this. In fact, much of what makes life meaningful comes from precisely these things. We need relationships, purpose, creativity and a sense of belonging. But Becker’s idea raises a more difficult question: what happens when the identity we have built our life around begins to disappear?
Loosing your vision can do this. So can illness, ageing, divorce, redundancy or the death of someone close to us. We may suddenly find that a role we have inhabited for decades is no longer available to us. The loss can be practical, but it can also be much deeper. We may not simply be losing something we do; we may be losing part of the person we believed ourselves to be.
For me, this question has become particularly real through my sight loss.
I am a painter, and painting is not simply something I have done for a while. It is part of how I have understood myself. Painting has given me a way of looking at the world, of making sense of what I see and of expressing something that words sometimes cannot reach. It has been part of my identity and, in many ways, part of my relationship with the world.
Now I am going blind.
The obvious loss is that I can no longer see as I once did. Colours become less reliable, detail disappears and the visual information I once took for granted becomes increasingly difficult to interpret. But the deeper loss is harder to describe. I am not simply losing the ability to paint in the way I used to. I am losing the painter I thought I was.
That is a much more confronting thing.
There is another, surprisingly ordinary way in which I have become aware of this loss of identity. When people meet me, one of the first questions they often ask is, “What do you do?” For most of my adult life, I had an easy answer. I could say, “I’m a painter,” or “I’m a tutor.” Those answers told people something about me, and, perhaps more importantly, they told me something about myself. I knew where I stood.
That is no longer so straightforward.
I have found myself struggling to answer the question. I might explain that I used to teach, that I am a painter but can no longer paint, that I write, that I am involved in mindfulness. All of these things are true, but none of them quite seems to answer the question in the way my old answers did.
And I notice something else: a distinct feeling of unease.
It is almost as though the question is asking me to present a version of myself that I can no longer quite locate. I am searching for a label that will make sense to the other person, but at the same time I am searching for one that will make sense to me.
It makes me wonder how much of our identity is held together by these simple social exchanges. “What do you do?” seems like an innocent question, yet we often answer it with a role, a profession or an achievement. We don’t usually say, “I am someone who is learning to live with uncertainty,” or “I am a person trying to understand what it means to be alive.” We give them a job title.
Perhaps this is part of Becker’s hero system at work. Our roles provide us with a recognizable place in the world. They give us continuity and status and, perhaps, a small sense of permanence. When one of those roles disappears, the discomfort may be greater than the practical loss itself because the story of who we are has been interrupted.
If I am no longer able to do something that has been central to how I experience myself, then who am I?
This is where Becker’s idea becomes interesting to me. Perhaps the identities we construct around ourselves provide a kind of psychological security. I am a painter. I am a writer. I create things that matter therefore I matter. These identities give continuity to the story of who I am.
But what happens when life begins removing the characters from that story?
Blindness has already taken away my ability to drive. It has changed the way I move through the world, how I read, how I work and how dependent I sometimes have to be on other people. But losing painting feels different. It touches something much closer to the centre of who I have understood myself to be.
And perhaps this is where Becker’s thinking meets mindfulness.
Buddhist practice continually invites us to look at the impermanent nature of the self. We experience ourselves as a continuous and solid “me”, yet when we look closely, almost everything about that self is changing. Our bodies change, our circumstances change, our thoughts change, our relationships change and the roles we occupy change.
Yet we continually construct a sense of solidity from all of this movement.
Perhaps Becker is describing one of the ways we do that. We create a story about ourselves and then spend considerable energy maintaining and protecting it. I am successful. I am independent. I am a good person. I am needed. I am an artist. I am a painter.
There is nothing wrong with any of these descriptions. The difficulty comes when I begin to believe that they are who I am, rather than simply descriptions of how I have lived.
So I find myself wondering whether there is another possibility.
What happens if I don’t have to replace the identity I am losing with a new one?
What happens if I don’t have to find another way of proving that I am still somebody?
Perhaps the challenge of blindness is not only learning how to live without sight. Perhaps it is also an invitation to discover what remains when some of the things I have used to define myself begin to fall away.
That is not an easy invitation to accept. There is grief in it, and there is fear. I don’t want to romanticize the loss of my sight or pretend that losing the ability to paint is somehow a gift. There are things I will genuinely miss, and there are parts of myself that I am grieving already.
But alongside that grief is a question that I find increasingly interesting.
If I am no longer the painter I once was, does that mean I am less of a person?
If I can no longer see the world in the way I once did, does that mean there is less of a world available to me?
Or could it be that some of what I have been calling “myself” was always more fluid than I imagined?
Perhaps letting go of an identity does not mean becoming insignificant. Perhaps it means discovering that significance was never something I needed to continually prove.
Mindfulness does not necessarily give us another identity to hold onto. Instead, it can give us a place from which to observe the identities we have constructed, including the ones that are beginning to disappear.
And perhaps there is a strange freedom in discovering that I don’t have to immediately replace them.
I can simply be here, in this changing body, in this changing life, without knowing exactly who I am supposed to become.
Perhaps I can even allow myself to discover that I am more than the person I have spent my life trying to be.
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