Place as Defining Self...

Who are we, really, and what makes us and defines us?  Place, past, present? Ideas, outlook, relationships?  Experience, genes? As I travel about New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, I think of how many places I have lived (a lot), while also having spent 18 years in the same place my parents now still live and where my mother grew up, even though that place was still Indian Territory when her grandparents and great-grandparents came there.  Place and roots to me are major ways of defining oneself.  I am driving through places where my present is all twined up in my past.  My memories escape into my present, unabidden (?), just bubbling up in my moment.  Life used to be like that when I lived in the place I grew up, for almost ten years while married.  I'd pass a park and remember times past spent playing.  I'd encounter a person, place or thing that took my present back, unexpectedly.  When you move to new places, it is always the present moving into the future with little interruption in the present of the past.  At least that is what I've found.

These two self-portraits,  posted in different years of blogging as I moved to new places I'd never lived (NYC, left, and Santa Fe, right), are references as I move through places that have helped establish self-definition and my ideas of the world beyond this little place of the present, wherever that is. Now. When in NYC I was a student - of media studies, urban culture and space; when in Atlanta I was intrigued with the curiosities of southern culture and I found myself being a hostess and gardener and exhausted with teens in a place few came to visit and in a way, lost myself as I dug in dirt and planted; in Santa Fe I find myself reconnecting to myself with motherhood minimized with empty nest and a husband on sabbatical. 

In NYC the culture of walking on the street, seeing it, as my daughter termed it, as dancing to the rhythm of crowds and the timing of lights, a quadrille of sorts, on a grid system.  Vastly different from navigating the self to places around Houston or Atlanta street traffic, the former on the grid or eight-lanes, the latter on old pig and horse trails! Noting other cultural things specific to NYC and navigating the sense of self within it makes the self malleable when places don't have personal roots and are new to the self.  In Atlanta, the self is determined by the first question ever asked: So, wuzzzz your Daddy do?. In Houston, the self is what you do or plan to do, a meritocracy as NYC is, although the latter wants to determine quickly how much you are paid to do what you do.

What makes us and defines our present?  People, places, things... routines or traditions, any and all.

Comments

[susiej]

MotherPie, I'm struggling with this internally. Funny, how we have an image or an idea in our minds how how we are, but life circumstances, or other's perceptions or responsibilities block us.... or do they? Or do they help more fully define who we are?

[anthony]

We define our own "present". Where I went to school, where I work, or where I live, would not be how I allowed anyone to define me. Past experiences certainly have an imprint on me, but where I go tomorrow is my choice, so I guess I would say "I" define me. The past is just that!

[joared]

I've always thought more about the new people I've met in the different places I've lived as defining the experience of residence there. All that you describe is defining, also.