BP 164
My name is Cassie. I grew up in a Christian home with parents who loved Jesus and with a sister and brother who said they loved God, too. Most people would say that we had an amazing family. For the most part that was true—every family has its imperfections, of course.
Despite the “good” family I was in, I was never able to know myself. I don’t think I was aware of it when I was ten, but I did not have a clear identity. I was a daughter and a sister and would call myself a Christian, but something was missing. I didn’t entirely know what, though. On some level, I knew it had to do with me.
Looking back, I think my identity was invested in being a “good” girl. I think on some level I believe that is what both my parents and God wanted me to be—good. I thought Christianity itself was about being moral, good, nice.
So, now you know two things about me, namely, I didn’t have a clear sense of who Cassie was, and I thought I was supposed to be good. A third thing about me was that I hated change. I was an anxious little girl and did not like anything that surprised me or shook my world. I even hated thunder. I always felt a bit shaky in the world and around groups of people. I was not a “grounded” person. If I had known who I was and been more confident about my identity, I don’t think I would have had so much anxiety around others.
Despite all these characteristics about me, there was a season of life I did enjoy. I would say the golden season started around age five and lasted until fourteen. At fourteen, things began to change around me which laid bare my lack of self. A good friend of mine moved away and my older brother left for college. My mother went back to work and my father got busier at his job and was so exhausted at night that he didn’t seem to have energy for me or my siblings. My sister was busy with her friends, and I was left more alone.
Aloneness. Am I the only one who hates aloneness?
I hated all the changes in my life. The golden season was over–forever. Maybe all these changes were not that big if you looked at them one at a time, but when they were all added together, they were enough to throw off my inner equilibrium. I felt off. I felt behind, less than others, emotionally less mature. I did not fit in and worked hard to hide my anxiety and sadness around that feeling of being on the outside. Maybe Erik Erikson was right when he proposed that the years 12-18 were critical for either developing an identity or getting stuck in feelings of confusion. I was clearly not developing a sense of identity. Did all the changes around me create the confusion or did they simply reveal it?
I’ve already mentioned that I hate change, right? It was no surprise, then, that when I left home for college, I felt extremely lost. I began to feel confused at fourteen, but now, at eighteen, I felt so alone—so outside of the world of others.
I became more anxious and even had bouts of depression. A “friend” helped me discover alcohol and it made me feel so much better—for a while. I drifted away from God because I felt that if God loved me so much, how could He leave me so alone in my pain and isolation? I dated a guy for a while but when he broke up with me, I felt even more depressed. Who was there for me? Who even cared about me? Who even had an inkling what was going on inside of me? I believed I was forgotten or undesirable to everyone.
When I finally graduated from college, I felt like all my meager anchors were ripped away from me. I lost my safe community, my identity as a student, and even my faith in God that was so connected to my college experience. All my friends knew what they wanted to do and left on their own personal missions. I was alone. Lost. My parents and siblings thought I was fine because I was still acting like the good girl. Maybe I looked fine on the outside, but I certainly wasn’t fine on the inside. No one knew that about me.
Months went by. I was hungry for love and to know who I was. I was highly impressionable. I met some lesbian-identified women who seemed strong in their sense of identity and I began to feel a camaraderie when I was with them. I slowly became one of them. It felt so good to belong somewhere and to have a clear identity.
The only problem was that locating myself in my sexual identity distracted me from knowing myself on the deepest level. I avoided looking into my soul.
I couldn’t find my identity in Christ because He had not been there in my deepest pain and His people had not seemed to care about me. Everyone thought I was fine because I looked good and sounded good. They didn’t pursue my heart to find out what was going on at my deepest level of need and hunger and loneliness. I was angry with them for that and cut them off.
Swallowing hurt and rehearsing bitterness makes a sharp blade with which to severe connection.
I miss thirteen—before everything changed. Before I changed. Life was mostly safe, cozy, and fun back then. Simpler. I could push away the anxiety that lived inside of me. But then the storm of change came just when I was confronted with the squall of self-identity—the proverbial perfect storm. I still don’t know why they call it the “perfect storm.” It capsized my life.
Why is life so complicated? Why is it so difficult to discover who one is? Why did I end up getting hurt by others in so many ways? With my parents, it wasn’t primarily what they did that hurt me. It was what they didn’t do that hurt me. They didn’t really see me. They accepted the outside Cassie as a true representation of the inside Cassie without looking at me closely enough to see who I truly was. Maybe I hid it all too well. Whatever all the ingredients were in the “storm,” I found myself alone and hungry for love.
Now I can’t go back. Even if I decided that sexual identity is not the main definer of self and walked away from my lesbian identity, what man would want me now? I have chosen my path and now I must continue to walk in it.
Be careful what path you choose because it will be difficult to veer off it once you are familiar with it and have practiced its twists and turns.
Cassie’s story is not atypical. In fact, it is becoming a much more common story as God is pushed out of our culture only to be replaced by the search not for the divine but for identities divorced from Him. The main point in this post is not sexual identity, however, but the critical search for self in a world that tries to define itself apart from God. Once our identity in God is minimized, we must search for our identity elsewhere. We can look for it in sexual identity, fame, “likes”, performance, even trying to be a “good” person. None of these will satisfy or lead us to the identity in which we were fashioned before time began.
C.S. Lewis once wrote, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” I agree wholeheartedly! I would simply add that our very identity was forged in another world and will never be found in this temporal world of fame and sex and achievement. We can only find our identity in the One who designed and created us for Himself.
The truth is that all of us struggle with identity. We might look for our self-worth in the approval of those around us, riding the roller coaster of whether others seem to like us or not. We might settle for finding our identity in our sexuality. We might assert that God does not even exist and so we are left to duct tape together our fragmented selves that can only be healed by the Triune God.
The journey toward identity is opposed, of course. Satan wants to drive you far from your Maker and the Divine Lover of your heart. The dark prince lies to you that you are alone in the universe and must discover who you are on your own. He will attempt to twist your mind to believe that either you are unlovable or that God’s love does not extend to you. For some reason you are disqualified. He will cull you from God’s herd and drive you off into a box canyon all by yourself where He will accuse you of being so bad that not even God’s forgiveness and grace applies to you.
Bottom line: be aware of the war that became your reality the second you took your first breath. God calls you to Himself because He knows that only in knowing Him will you know yourself. Satan deceives you and seduces you away from your Beautiful Creator because the fallen one desires you to be who he is and where he is, namely, without an identity and far from the Maker of everything lovely and good.
Do not judge the Cassies of the world, for you are their sisters and their brothers. We are all in the war together. Seek Jesus so fiercely and so often that when you are around Cassie, she will be able to “recognize that you have been with Jesus” (Acts 4:13) and will desire the One who gives you joy. Only as we live in Jesus’ presence will we know who we are. Away from His presence there is only darkness. So, come to the light and walk as children of the light for your sake and for Cassie’s sake.
“But now thus says the LORD,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name [given you your identity], you are mine” ~ Isaiah 43:1,2
“Has a nation changed its gods,
even though they are no gods?
But my people have changed their glory
for that which does not profit.
Be appalled, O heavens, at this;
be shocked, be utterly desolate,
declares the LORD,
for my people have committed two evils:
they have forsaken me,
the fountain of living waters [the source of true identity],
and hewed out cisterns for themselves [self-made identities],
broken cisterns that can hold no water” ~ Jeremiah 2:11-13