Identity Index: Adaptable

What is my relationship to being adaptable? I identify as adaptable. I have a story about myself that I am adaptable.

What does that mean to me?

This is an interesting one because as soon as I start to think about it I can feel into just how important it still is to me. I have this story that being adaptable is a trait more worthy of defending and nurturing than most of the others on my list. But as with any trait, just because it's largely adaptive or has significant positive aspects doesn't mean there's no shadow side whose exploration can provide important insights.

My story of adaptability is deeply entangled with the way I was raised, as a third culture kid [see: third culture kid], an American [see: American] who grew up overseas, who moved around a lot and who had an early and ongoing familiarity with uprooting my life and starting over from scratch in an entirely new place and situation.

It's also worth mentioning, though perhaps obvious, that I had no agency or choice in these uprootings as a child. My parents would decide to move (guided by their own set of externalities and projections), and my siblings and I were simply along for the ride. I don't remember feeling resentment for this but I did feel powerless at times, and when the impact of such moves felt like isolation or loneliness or loss of connection my only choice was in how to adapt to that reality, how to respond.

Then there was the breadth of cultural exposure I experienced growing up in international schools, the sort of quotidian adaptation of shifting interactions with people from almost infinite backgrounds and cultures. Dinner one night with a Finnish friend and his family, the next with a Cantonese family. One month in the massive metropolis of Seoul, South Korea, the next in the small rural Floridian town of Marianna. One day dodging tear gas and riotous Yonsei University students clashing with police, another on an ATV roaming in the woods. My ability to adapt to anything felt paramount.

These still feel like inadequate axis on which to explore this aspect of my identity. My father being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when I was six years old is another entry point. Now the whole family had to adapt our reality and path to a seemingly random and cruel twist of fate.

Much of my adaption was intertwined with masking [see: agreeable], with presenting a calm [see: calm] and quiet exteriority regardless of what I felt, a neutral, blank canvas for others' projections until I had appropriately gauged a version of myself to display.

As my story of being adaptable became more central, a certain stoicism became entangled with it. An ability to endure and adapt to situations might mean buying a sixteen hour bus ticket through remote Peru because it was cheap, and gritting my teeth through the reality of the experience itself. Or analogously, staying in a relationship a year longer than made any good sense because it felt comfortable, and rationalizing this to myself as a form of adapting to my circumstances.

So a big aspect of the shadow side here as I write these things seems to be a disownment of desire. By placing so much importance on my story of adaptability, and flexibility, I sometimes allow myself not to fully check in with my feelings and desires about something. I'm flexible, I'll adapt. What I actually want in the matter is inconsequential.

Taken to a more extreme form, which I've certainly experienced in myself, this can become a resigned indifference to exercising my agency in the world at all, a sort of go-with-the-flow, meandering path through a life of happenstance. Passivity [see: passive] is the word that comes to mind, ouch, that's one that feels a bit triggering, I'm adding it to my list.

The irony of this version of an adaptability story, of course, is that true adaptability looks nothing like passivity – it is more akin to industriousness, the capacity to know and honor your true needs well enough to mold a broad set of circumstances towards their being met. Instead, the passive form seeks both to resign oneself to not knowing ones needs, not getting them met, and also not being with the felt consequences of these choices, either.

Let's be real: life is extremely unpredictable, especially in the times we're living through. In the best case, our ability to exert agency and control over our circumstances is limited. Even so, a giving up into a story of adaptability is a form of not owning my responsibility to exercise discernment around that agency, and change what I'm capable of changing.

I think about this all especially in the context of potentially starting a family soon. Our world is in the throes of a meta-crisis where existential risk vectors are almost too many to count, and too complex to prioritize behavioral responses among. Should I be more worried about climate change or mass extinction or the rise of China or Crispr or AI or collapsing fertility or or or. Who knows?

In any children of mine that may come along, then, adaptability to a rapidly changing set of circumstances does seem like a vitally important trait to cultivate, perhaps one of the most essential. And yet, being able to do so from a place of thoughtful consideration as to the potential pitfalls and shadow impacts as well feels vital.

Continuing to find my own balance between adaptability and ownership of desire and agency is part of my work of stepping into responsibility and purpose.

Anyway, this all feels true and real to me. What more can I share? I'll revisit this later and see if more comes up.

For now: Adaptable Matt, I love you and am working on accepting all parts of you fully. You're a part of my wholeness and also you don't need to be forever. The story can change but right now it's great and complete.

Meta Reflection

On pressing publish: Somehow this story feels incomplete, as I'm choosing to move forward with calling this post finished for the moment I have an intuition that I'm missing some important aspect of what's here for me. I feel a vulnerability in this because someone else's reflection might be so obvious in pointing it out once I hear it. Duh.

Acknowledging how my adaptability has been entangled with a permissioned passivity is probably where I feel the most vulnerable in what I've written here. I was given a reflection of being experienced as passive months ago that I still don't feel fully integrated around, so I feel the rumblings of discomfort around exploring that more deeply.

Time to hit that publish button, I suppose.