Who Are You Exactly?

I watched someone today almost not be able to go into a place she needed to go because she was carrying no ID. As she frantically searched for something that might prove she actually "existed" (which, in an odd turn of twenty-first century reality, turned out to be her Facebook page on her phone), I thought about what it meant to travel the city (or anyplace, for that matter) without ID. After all, kids far too young for driver's licenses get themselves around all day in a public transportation city. As parents, we get used to them traveling alone or in small groups, and we offer cautions about handling strangers and diverted trains, but how often do we really consider what it means for them to be out in the world? How often do we think about what we grownups, with wallets full of cards, take for granted? And as grownups ourselves, how often do we even consider who we are once we walk out the door into a world of strangers?
 
As we post pictures and links and declarations on a variety of social media platforms, and as we do our jobs and live our lives each day, we are developing an identity that travels with us. Powerful as those profiles might be (and as a frequent job-hunter, I can attest to their power), they don't necessarily tell the "man on the street" or the guard at the door who we are. As many times as we introduce ourselves more as "what we do" than "who we are," who we are still matters, whether to a security guard or to us.
 
Watching the woman having to negotiate security with no document to prove her identity was certainly a cautionary tale for me--of how we live in the world, and of how it is we identify ourselves. It will likely change how I walk out the door, and how I let my kids do so. But it also made me think a lot about making sure that the "who we are" doesn't get lost in the shuffle of "what we do." Because whether or not we have a card or piece of paper to show at the security desk, we need to know who we are, and no job or accomplishment or raise is going to tell us that. It's not just about facing the world with an ID card in our pocket. It's about knowing for ourselves, and being able to tell the world, exactly who we are.