Identity

Identity is a complicated concept. I often ask my students at the start of the school year how they identify themselves. Many consider sports or avocations as their identifier. Others gravitate to family roles. Still others consider culture or ethnicity. There are numerous ways in which we all identify ourselves, and almost all of us identify ourselves with multiple labels.  We are different things to different people. We are different things in different arenas. Our core identity--the way in which we see ourself, however, rarely changes, whatever that may be.

A long time ago, I used to identify myself primarily through my art. I was an actor. A performer. A writer. A poet. Whether I was good or bad, whether I was working for paltry sums or simply the joy of it, whether I was recognized as such by others or not, was irrelevant. That was how I identified myself. I worked. I practiced. I developed a craft.

The last several years, I have changed the way I identify myself. Mostly, that shift in identity was due to the amount of time I was spending doing "art" versus doing "work." I now identify myself as a teacher.  I spend the bulk of my time doing the same thing as a teacher as I did as an artist, in some respect. I work. I practice. I hone my craft. I love my job as much as I loved my art, but, the last few months, I have been feeling a sense of something missing from my life. I don't miss acting, too much. Sometimes the itch rises, but not often. After all, I get the chance to do some theatrics once a year, so that satisfies me. However, what I really miss (and what I have had the most difficult time cultivating) is my writing.  I don't do it, and I miss it.

I think the realization that I needed to fix that came this past November, when, due to just too much else in the way of commitments, I didn't even try to participate in National Novel Writing Month. It was the first time in eight years or so that I did not do it, and, while I didn't mind not dealing with the stress of having to pound out more than 1500 words a day, I was depressed that I wasn't even trying. So I knew I needed to write, and I knew I needed to make the time to do it.

Then, I thought of old Central Standard, that ancient blog that I had kept since 2006, which, despite a few fits and starts, I hadn't kept up for the last two or three years. I decided that I would resolve to start keeping the blog up again. I needed that reason, a schedule, maybe, to hew out an hour or two each week to get something written, regardless of topic or intent.

The problem there was, due to my negligence, a shift in email addresses, and an inability to remember passwords and such, I could not figure out how to access the dashboard for the old blog. This I took as a sign, and I am taking this opportunity to completely break with the old and to embrace a new blog.

So welcome to My Great American Desert. I have no idea what sort of focus I will have here. I never had much of a focus on the old blog, either. The only thing that matters is that I get back into the swing of things, because I want to be a teacher, but I need to be a writer.