If you’ve ever felt exhausted trying to live up to the expectations of a certain role — the good son, the sister who steps in to save the day, the guy who can be relied on at work — you know what it’s like to have an identity crisis, the feeling that the persona you’re inhabiting is different from who you really are.
It’s an understandable feeling, but it’s also a misguided one. If you’re in a crisis about who you really are, it’s likely because you haven’t accepted that you are actually multiple people. Your roles as a partner, a coworker, and a daughter or son are all very different, but trying to reconcile these characters is pointless. You can’t, and you shouldn’t try.
Having multiple role-identities gives us a sense of meaning, reduces marital stress, and helps combat feelings of social isolation.
Having a broad identity spectrum is healthy. The dilemma arises when we try to embody our multiple identities simultaneously.
“Identity negotiation,” a theory first outlined by sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, is the idea that each of our relationships is built on a sort of mutually agreed-upon, identity-based code of conduct. This defining of who’s who in the relationship reduces friction, minimizes conflict, and sets expectations about how each person will behave with each other one.
It’s normal for identity negotiation to yield different outcomes in different relationships. In fact, it’s ideal. Research suggests that having multiple role-identities gives us a sense of meaning, reduces marital stress, and helps combat feelings of social isolation.
But when we try to force all those disparate roles into one cohesive identity, we create unnecessary stress. It’s an attempt to do the impossible. In order to truly be happy, we must embrace the fact that we have multiple identities and learn to manage them properly by seamlessly transitioning from one role to another.
You don’t need to play the same character for your whole life.
In 1999, Jim Carrey portrayed his idol, the late actor Andy Kaufman, in Man on the Moon. His intense method acting was captured in behind-the-scenes footage and released in the 2017 documentary Jim & Andy, in which Carrey reflects on the challenges of returning to his normal self after embodying a different persona so fully. Carrey concluded that his normal self, “Jim Carrey,” was just another character he portrayed.
Carrey took a step back and looked at his life from a higher perspective. Constantly performing can get tiring. In the end, he concluded that identity is just a “construct,” and we should take that as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves. Instead of worrying, “Who am I?” it may be more helpful to ask, “Who do I want to be?”
Of course, there are different answers at different times for all of us. That’s exactly the point: You don’t need to play the same character your whole life.
In 1979, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer gathered two groups of eight men in their late seventies and early eighties for a week-long retreat in which they would “live” in the year 1959. The control group was allowed to acknowledge that 1959 had happened 20 years ago. The other group, however, had to live, speak, and act as if it actually was 1959. Before the week was over, both groups showed significant mental, behavioral, and physical changes.
Langer concludes in her book, Counterclockwise, that “the mind has enormous control over the body” and that “the participants got ‘younger,’” with improved hearing, memory, strength, and flexibility. Notably, the experimental group improved on intelligence tests at a higher rate than the control group.
Like Jim Carrey, these men played characters in their mind, and their bodies followed suit. This isn’t to say you’ll get perfect abs by pretending you’re a cast member of Baywatch, but it proves that mentally identifying with characters can have real effects. Playing empowering roles can make us both stronger and happier.
But we can’t just be authentic in private, can we? There will be other roles, too, that don’t make you feel quite as good. According to identity negotiation theory, we’ll never live up to the many different roles in our various relationships 100% of the time, let alone see a perfect, uniform picture when we look in the mirror. That’s okay, as long as we take timeouts, embrace our multitude of roles as a useful tool, and don’t stress too much about the little details that don’t add up.