Editor’s note: This piece was written during the COVID-19 pandemic and reflects that moment in time. The questions it raises about identity, disruption, and psychological resilience remain relevant beyond the specific circumstances that prompted them.
At the time of this writing, the COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent effects had been bearing down on all of us for a little over one year. While some experienced its impact as an opportunity for growth, the vast majority of people encountered it as negatively affecting their lives. Among the many challenges it presented, one kept appearing consistently in clinical work: identity.
Defining Identity
A working definition of identity could be broadly posed as “who I understand myself to be.” Within that statement, one might attend to the kinds of statements that arise when describing oneself, specific feelings or bodily sensations, certain memories that give credence to one’s self-image, or even future depictions of who one might become. Regardless, these different aspects of a person say something about who they experience themselves to be.
Most people tend to experience their identity as structurally stable — they wake up and recognize who’s looking back at them in the mirror. Most understand themselves as the same person over time, with generally predictable behavior, so long as nothing terribly out of the ordinary occurs.
Safe to say, a global pandemic qualifies as out of the ordinary. For many, it presented direct challenges to who we understood ourselves to be. Perhaps someone saw themselves as a hardworking student, but found themselves too exhausted with online learning to maintain that identity. Or someone who thought of themselves as a loving partner found themselves becoming easily frustrated after months of forced proximity. Or a social person found themselves hesitant to re-engage with friends and family after sustained messages about invisible contagion. The ever-present theme: these challenges destabilize identity — our sense of who we are — in ways that can be disorienting and painful.
Your Identity Bag
To engage with these experiences, a useful metaphor is the bug out bag. During certain periods — military service, emergency preparedness, disaster response — it’s essential to have a bag prepped and ready at a moment’s notice. These bags offer the necessary essentials to survive during a period of disruption and transition, a short-term way of coping when home is not accessible. The goal is not to live out of this bag forever, but to survive on the way to eventual settlement.
A subtle implication inherent to the bug out bag is that home will be a new place — either because the physical space has changed, or because the person inhabiting it has. For many, the COVID-19 pandemic created exactly this kind of disruption: home was lost, and everyone had to pull out their bag.
The problem, though, is not merely that the pandemic happened — but that it continued to happen. Having to use one’s bug out bag is cause enough for concern. But living out of a short-term bag for an extended time raises harder questions: when will I be home? Is returning home even possible? And even if I could return to the place once called home, will it truly be the same place I left?
In the context of identity: will I be the same person at the end of this? Even if I could be, would I want that?
The Trauma of Prolonged Disruption
These questions mirror what we know about traumatic event mitigation. Research shows that people are generally resilient in the face of traumatic events, especially those that are shorter in duration and occur only once — because less adaptation is required to make sense of and integrate them. More complex, long-lasting disruption, on the other hand, tends to carry a larger impact, requiring more coping resources and more energy to adapt.
What can feel most unsettling is the desire to return to a prior state of being — to the person one was before. In some ways, being conscious of that desire already means looking at the past in the rear-view mirror. What can feel scary is the sense that if we turn our gaze back to the road ahead of us, there is no certainty it will be the same road we previously expected to be on.
When we experience our thoughts, emotions, or sense of self as different from how we understand our identity, it can create anxiety and disequilibrium — a sense of not fully having a grounded sense of who we are.
The Question of Choice
While many people did not have a choice in what effects a prolonged crisis had on their lives, one quality remains available: the ability to choose one’s attitudinal stance in response to unexpected circumstances. By choice, this doesn’t mean the ability to change circumstances, or what thoughts and emotions arise — merely that one can choose how to engage with challenging circumstances.
Do I shut down and isolate, or find ways to continue connecting even when it’s exhausting? Can I extend myself empathy for not performing at my prior level under genuinely different conditions? Does my world shrink around me, or can I press back against it?
Far from applying only to pandemic experience, helping people understand what barriers exist to living a meaningful life — and what choices may or may not be available in navigating those barriers — is central to all good psychotherapy. If you’d like to explore how therapy can help, call 720-675-7918 or request an appointment online.