Who am I?

‘Who am I?’ This has been a big question for me.

For a period in my childhood, I was convinced that I was a girl. Though externally I seemed to be a boy, and everyone thought I was a boy, I felt that internally I was a girl. I remember living with the fear that one day I would get pregnant (obviously this was before I was aware how these things work!) and then my big secret would be revealed. I quietly resigned myself to the fact I’d just have to live with my parents for the rest of my life and never get married. As I grew up, this feeling went away, but I remained uncomfortable as a man, never really feeling I fitted in, uncomfortable in all-male environments, and secretly wanting to be considered ‘one of the girls’.

My teen years raised new questions about my identity. As puberty hit, new desires emerged, but they weren’t desires for girls, as I might have expected; they were for guys. At first, I didn’t really realize what was going on; I don’t think I had any understanding that some people are same-sex attracted or gay. I kept quiet about these new desires for several years, and it was still a secret known to only a few by the time I reached my twenties.

But all through those years I was listening, trying to make sense of what I was experiencing. Judging by what some people said, it seemed that this was the worst thing possible, that these desires somehow made me a lesser person, and this all made me believe I should never tell anyone. But at the same time, others seemed to think these desires were the most important thing about me, that they were actually who I am. These people seemed to think I should declare to the world ‘I’m gay’ and that I should be sure to embrace and act on my desires to find my best life.

In my twenties, identity continued to be an issue. I was now an adult who had left home and was trying to find my way in adult life, but I was also becoming increasingly self-conscious. I began to find that just being on my own in public made me so uncomfortable that my face would involuntarily twitch. During these years, I had a few fairly major meltdowns as my mental health yo-yoed up and down. In the wake of one of these meltdowns, with the help of a counsellor, I discovered I was living with an identity of which I wasn’t even aware. Deep down, the controlling self-understanding in my life was that I was a freak and a weirdo. I assumed that was what everyone thought of me, and so I assumed that was just who I was.

I’ve had to wrestle with the question, ‘Who am I?’ Am I how I feel inside? Not a woman but not really fully a man? Am I my sexual desires, a gay guy who needs a husband to be happy? Or am I what I instinctively assume other people think of me, a freak and a weirdo?

These have been uncomfortable questions to ask. At times they’ve been very painful to ask, but as I’ve done so, I’ve found there is a better answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ I have found that my best identity isn’t based on what I feel or desire inside, and it isn’t based on what I assume other people think about me; my best identity is based on what my Creator says about me. God dictates my identity. And therefore, I will find my best life, not by embracing every- thing I find within or by listening to what I hear (or just assume) around me; I will find my best life by living out my God-given identity.

What is identity?

What do I mean when I talk about identity? As I’ll use it in this book, identity is our controlling self-understanding. All of us live with a concept of who we really are and what we believe to be most fundamental and important about us. This is a self-understanding. It’s how we understand our self.

And that self-understanding, even if it remains subconscious, impacts how we feel and how we live. Your self-understanding can be involved in giving you a sense that you have worth and value, or that you don’t, and it can therefore have a big impact on your emotional and mental health. That’s why having an unhealthy identity can be so harmful and can take us to very dark and painful places.

Your self-understanding will also often impact how you live. Sometimes that’s because we want to live out an identity in order to display it to those around us and to experience our best life through doing so. At other times it’ll be because we’re trying to escape from an identity; we want to be someone else. Who you think you are influences how you live your life.

In these ways, our identity controls us; it impacts how we feel and how we live. That’s why it’s a controlling self-understanding.

Working with this definition, there are lots of things that are true of us that aren’t our identity (things like our race and ethnicity, occupation, and history). Something that is true of us only becomes our identity when it becomes core to how we view ourselves and when it therefore begins to exert some control over us, affecting how we feel and how we live. Identity is our controlling self-understanding.

How do I find who I am?

Understanding what identity is helps us to see why it is so important. It shows us that it’s right and good to ask the question ‘Who am I?’ But there’s actually another question that needs to be asked before this, a question we rarely think to ask. That question is ‘How do I find who I am?’

In asking ‘Who am I?’ we take for granted that we know how best to find our identity. But do we really? My own journey hasn’t just been about finding out who I am; at different points, I’ve been pretty certain who I am: a girl in a boy’s body, or a gay man, or a freak and a weirdo. In reality, the question I needed an answer to was ‘How do I find who I am?’ That’s the question that helps us find our best identity. And we want to find our best identity because doing so, and living out that identity, will help us experience our best life. Getting this right is really important.

Over the next few chapters, we’ll unmask some of the different ways that people find their identity, seeing which work and which don’t, and looking for the best answer to the question ‘How do I find who I am?’ Once we’ve got that answer, we’ll be in a better position to ask, ‘Who am I?’

Identity, sexuality and gender

One of the reasons identity is so important is because of the way it intersects with two aspects of human existence that are important for all of us: sexuality and gender.

In times gone by, and sadly all too often still today, some people have been made to feel like freaks or in some way less than human because of their experience of sexuality or gender. Identities have been placed on LGBTQ+ people, branding them with labels such as degenerate or disgusting. Christians have played our part in this, both in the past and the present, and the Bible’s teaching has been wrongly understood and applied, resulting in damaging and destructive identities being placed on LGBTQ+ people.

But the importance of identity in relation to sexuality and gender is also seen in a very different way. In modern Western society, both sexual orientation (our enduring pattern of sexual and romantic attraction and desires) and gender identity (our internal sense of gender) are considered to be core identities. Many believe that these internal experiences are who we are, and that they therefore need to be embraced and expressed in order to allow us to live our best life. Against this backdrop, the historic Christian sexual ethic is seen as offensive and intolerant because it seems to ask people to deny who they really are.

Gay people are asked to deny who they really are because the Christian sexual ethic says marriage and sex are to be reserved for lifelong unions of one man and one woman.

Trans people are asked to deny who they really are because the Christian ethic says that our bodies are determinative for our gender, and so we should live out the gender of our biological sex.

When Christians and non-Christians, and increasingly Christians and other Christians, clash on issues of sexuality and gender, it isn’t just because we have different views on who we can have sex with (which we do) or, more importantly, because we have different views on what sex and marriage are about (which we do), it’s also because we have different views on how to find our best identity.

We need to think about this. If we don’t think about it, we won’t be able to engage with the world around us. We might try to engage, but we’ll be talking past each other because we’ll be talking about different topics without even realizing it and we’ll be unaware of the pain that some people are experiencing, some of which may have been caused by Christians.

We need to think about it so we can engage with young people in our churches and our families. Every day the world around them is telling them that sexuality and gender are identity issues. It’s no wonder that many hear the Bible’s teaching, believe that God is asking them or their friends to deny who they really are, and consequently reject it as unreasonable and unloving.

And we need to think about it so we can engage with ourselves. Sexuality and gender are real life issues for all of us, and all of us, in different ways and to different extents, will be surrounded by the message that our sexuality and gender are who we are.

We need to think about identity. Is there an answer to the destructive identities that have often been placed on LGBTQ+ people? Is it true that the historic Christian sexual ethic asks many of us to deny who we really are? Before we can answer these questions, we need to know how to find our best identity, and to know that, we need to first ask the question: ‘How do I find who I am?’