REsources for Living
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“Who are you?” the caterpillar asks Alice in Alice in Wonderland. It turns out that is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Maybe the caterpillar would like to know who Alice is in relationship to him. After all, she’s a stranger in Wonderland. The caterpillar is likely wondering where this stranger came from and what to make of her.
It turns out that this side of our identity is something that we run into a lot. We humans are relational creatures, and we want to understand how other people’s lives connect with ours. When you meet a new person they might want to know where you work or where you go to church or where your kids go to school.
Unfortunately, we humans are also quite territorial, and all too ready to decide that someone “doesn’t belong.” After her encounter with the caterpillar, Alice ends up growing so tall that her neck becomes long and snake-like, and a pigeon, in great disgust, accuses her of being a serpent. It doesn’t do Alice any good to protest that she is a little girl—the pigeon has already concluded that Alice is a serpent after her eggs.
This is rather silly in Wonderland—after all, no one ever really eats a mushroom and turns into a giant with a long neck—but it happens all the time that people decide who we are, and then conclude that what they have invented about us makes us a threat. And the less people know—the more they categorize someone as a stranger—the more likely they are to see them as potentially dangerous. For instance, people in locations with very few immigrants tend to be much more negative about immigration than people who live in places with large populations of people from outside the country. People who believe that they don’t know any LGBT folks are more likely to be homophobic than people who have LGBT friends or family.
Our brains want to affirm our identity by identifying who we are not. Evolution has shaped our brains to distrust those we think of as being not like us. But the world changes faster than evolution does, and in the modern world our chances of being neighbors with people who are, in one way or another, not like us are just about 100%.
So how do we re-tune our brains to this world where we constantly encounter people who are outside our “tribe,” who differ from us in ethnicity or race or language or politics or gender or sexual orientation or ability or any of the 1001 ways that people are different from one another?
Maybe some part of the answer lies in our ability to answer the question Who are you? There are so many answers to that question. We are our relationships: parents, children, siblings, partners, friends, colleagues, teachers and students. We are our heritage: race, ethnicity, language, stories. We are our sexual and gender identities. We are our bodies: age, ability, height, appetites. We are our theologies and our philosophies, the things we’ve learned and the things we want to explore. We are our hopes and fears and dreams and disappointments.
And not one of those things is normal. Or abnormal. When we invest the time and attention into deeply and specifically answering the question Who are you? we come up with a long list of precious details that we hold in common with others—and at least as many that differ from people who we know. The tendency to identify people as “strange” or “other” rests in the assumption—often unconscious—that our identity and experience is “normal.” But the more we look at all the facets of who we are, the more obvious it becomes that our intricate set of facets couldn’t possibly be the same for everyone.
But there’s another piece of the puzzle. Alice, in the confusion of falling down the rabbit hole and changing size and meeting beings as surprising as a hookah-smoking caterpillar, loses track of who she is. Or at least loses the ability to define herself in the ways she is used to. But in moving through a place where so much is unknown to her she is challenged to understand herself in new ways. Which is another part of the answer to how we change our brains.
When we dare to enter unfamiliar places, talk with unfamiliar people, taste unfamiliar things (even if they don’t change our size), then who we are expands to meet our expanded world. As Alice experiences, we may run into folks who challenge our sense of who we are—who lead us to the awkward realization that we aren’t sure, that our identity is shifting with each surprising encounter. It isn’t necessarily comfortable, this interview with a caterpillar, or with any stranger. But it is what leads us into a Wonderland of discovery, where we move beyond imagined walls into new possibilities for who we might turn out to be.
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