Who Am I

If someone were to ask you, “Who are you?” how would you respond? What defines you as a person? If you had just a few sentences to describe yourself, what would you say? These questions in essence ask for your identity. Lots of people put this kind of thing in their social media bios. “Mother; wife; father; husband; Christian; atheist; lover of cats”: these are common. But also “computer programmer; house framer; teacher.”

Often (but certainly not always) our occupations become core parts of our identity. They work their way into how we speak, behave, and live. Our workplaces and jobs each evolve their own unique communities, cultures, and even languages. If you inhabit a particular occupational community for a while—learning and speaking its languages, participating in its rituals, growing a sense of belonging—you may feel as though your occupation becomes a part of who you are. This is precisely what I had when I was a historian. Being one defined me as a person. It steered how I interacted with the world and the people around me. It imparted me with confidence of purpose and clarity of direction. In other words, I knew who I was, where I was going, and what would be my tiny contribution in this world to the improvement of the human condition. This sense of purpose made me happy. When I was forced to leave professional academia (or rather, when it left me), it happened slowly at first, but then suddenly. When it finally began to wash over me that this abandonment had in fact occurred, the blow was terrible and its reverberations continue even now. It was like the death of someone I loved. And I mourned its passing. I still do.

I earned my Ph.D. in the spring of 2013. It took six years of some of the hardest mental labor I will ever perform. I completed a dissertation (which I believed was the first draft of my first book) about the transformation between 1770 and 1835 of Alabama, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana from a country dominated by Native Americans into the infamous “Old South” of white supremacy, cotton, and slavery. It took me 4 years to conceive, research, and write it. It came to over 400 manuscript pages. I am still extremely proud of that manuscript and believe deeply in its potential. I have still not fully confronted that it will only be the answer to a trivia question about my life. It will not be the book I wanted to write. Others who came behind me are writing it, have written it.

Being a historian, an academic, a scholar—these things were my identity and I loved them. As that identity slowly became untenable, I sank into utter despair. It’s still hard for me to describe that experience and convey all its darkness and pain, much of which is with me still, though in diminished form. In my head, in my heart, in my core, I knew that I was a failure. I don’t really believe that anymore. It is an objectively absurd, even self-indulgent notion. But it’s been a long road to begin to escape that failure. Now I am in my mid-to-late 30s and facing the reality that for all my years of hard work, it did not get me where I wanted to go. I need to start over.

In 2014, I was searching for something that could take my mind off all this. Something that would allow me to be a student again, but also something a world apart from what I’d done before. I wanted to build something tangible. So, I bought a circular saw, a drill, and a handful of other tools and built a cat tree. It sucked. I mean, it would have withstood a direct hit from a Tomahawk missile, I’m quite sure of that—quite over-engineered. But it also wasn’t straight, there were chasms where joints were supposed to be, and the cat house at the top was more of a cat shanty. But I was hooked. I wanted to do better and I wanted to do more. That’s where a new part of my identity began to take root.

I’ve been trying to think what this blog “is.” I still have no clue. So, I’m just going to have it be me. I think that’s going to mean a pretty wide range of topics, from existential philosophy and opinions on humanity and culture, to building furniture and cutting dovetails by hand (which is essentially the same as existential philosophy). I have come to see woodwork, especially furniture making, as creating art. I am as yet a very poor artist, but that I can conceive myself as one at all is truly stunning development given how I would have imagined my early middle age. Perhaps that has been the greatest source of light in all this gloom: I’m trying to learn that it’s never too late to find new confidence of purpose and clarity of direction.

If you’ve read this far, I welcome feedback. Curious about something? Let me know. In the meantime, I’ll try to write stuff, in one way or another, worth reading.