On the process of forming your own identity

I've often thought that one of the reasons I am so supportive of President Obama is that I share some things in common with him. They're not the kind of thing you'd notice much. And there are many ways that we're different. But where we are similar is that both of us took a long thoughtful approach to the development of our identity. Let me explain...

I was raised in a southern fundamentalist christian conservative family and community. Until I was in college, I bought into it all. Then - as I began to experience a lot of cognitive dissonance between the world as I experienced it and what I had been taught - I started to ask questions. Over the next 10-15 years I slowly and methodically went through everything I believed about myself and the world - starting with the political and progressing to the spiritual - and thought things through until I came to conclusions I could live with, both emotionally and rationally.

I watched others in my family and community do it differently. Either they swallowed it all or rebelled and rejected it in one fell swoop. Watching the rebels as adults, most of them have eventually done some thoughtful reflection as well. After all, simply saying "no" to what you were taught keeps you in as much bondage as buying into it all in the first place. Eventually you have to figure out what you do/don't believe for yourself.

When I read Obama's book Dreams From My Father, I saw it primarily as a treatise on his own identity formation. Obama's struggles were very different from mine. He had to figure out what it meant to be a Black man in this country while growing up in a white family with no African American community to fall back on. The two pillars of that journey were his visit to Kenya to find his father's family and his time as a community organizer in Chicago.

But Obama engaged in the same thoughtful slow process that I did. He could have done it differently. Many young men in his position either force themselves to adopt a "white" view of the world in order to fit in or rebel into the "angry black gangsta" routine.

I'm not sure what this says about either Obama or me. I do know that all roads that lead to authenticity in oneself are valid and would not judge anyone who took a different path.

But I suppose that whatever this says about us influences how we approach the world in general and problem-solving in particular. Neither of us is prone to sudden fits of pique or to rash conclusions. We tend to trust our minds and instincts to eventually figure things out.