David White, MD
Several years ago I was evaluating a young woman in her 30s for several complaints that we ultimately agreed were consequences of her obesity. Over the previous 10 years, her weight had more than doubled, transitioning her from a self-described sleek, muscular build of 140 lbs. to a cumbersome 325 lbs. As we began to explore how her weight had so significantly impacted her capacity to move, she declared to me with a paradoxical mix of pride and shame that, “Well, believe it or not, I used to be an athlete. In my senior year of high school, I was awarded Tri-County Athlete of the Year.”
While I was duly impressed by such recognition, what struck me in the moment was the preceding declarative, “I used to be an athlete.” I very matter of factly replied, “You do realize that you are that same person, don’t you? The muscles that stretched and flexed, the bones that gave support, the joints that moved in sequence and harmony in response to what your eye saw and your brain gave interpretation to are all still there! Yes, there has been change, but the same YOU is still here.” She listened quietly and intently. But it was only when I said with a celebratory smile, “You are still that athlete,” that she burst into tears. It was a moment of rediscovery. In a sense, it represented a reunion with self. It wasn’t my description of her anatomy and physiology that lead to this discovery, it was that I had reapplied her most beloved title, athlete; one thought to be lost for all time. The title “athlete” provided identity. It identified that “I am visible, I matter.”
We live in an age where value is often measured by titles. When making a new acquaintance, it is quite common to be confronted with the question, “What do you do?” Most of us quickly recognize this to be a question that seeks more to discover WHO we are. Knowing this, we are often inclined to answer with a title; I’m a doctor, a teacher, a student, a salesperson, a mother, an artist, or the penultimate…I’m retired. But what if a title escapes us? Do we become nothing or are we then relegated to actually describing “what we do” in the course of a day?
I personally faced this quandary in the first years of my marriage when I made the decision to go back to school to complete the coursework necessary for application to medical school. I embarked on this endeavor 18 months after graduating from Penn State where I had spent five years studying criminology. It was official: I was now a “pre-med student” — a title that, in my mind, declared with certainty that I would one day be a “doctor.” Three years later, I had 40 additional science credits to my name and a pile of medical school rejection letters representing two consecutive years of medical school applications. I was faced with the question, “Who am I?” I found myself literally pacing back and forth in my living room one afternoon asking myself, “What am I to do?” Self-examination revealed that this is who I was, this is what I loved, and this is what I wanted to do. But I had 30 letters from admission committees telling me that I wasn’t who I thought I was. I wasn’t good enough. So on several occasions I found myself wrestling with shame when facing the question,“What do you do?”
My shame was rooted in a loss of identity. There was no title for me… except perhaps failure. I had forgotten who I was. I had lost sight of all the things that escape title but matter most — things that truly delighted me and could be expressed in the love and care of others whether I carried the title “doctor” or not. Slowly, there was a humble rediscovery of who I was and a commitment to pursue that with patience and resolve. But this pursuit was not with a commitment of achieving a title in and of itself, but rather as an expression of myself in the context of other greater expressions as husband—father—son—friend, each of these then expressed in a myriad of contexts.
So my charge to you, my friends, is to seek not to be known and valued by a title only but rather in a fuller expression of who you uniquely are. It was not the title of “athlete” that made my patient so. Her rediscovery was that athleticism was a genuine expression of who she really was and is. Her delight had previously been found in precise expressions of movement with goals of competitive excellence. Sports were the context of this expression. My encouragement to her was to rediscover the joy and freedom and delight found in movement. To then adventure, explore, and discover. This is who she is.
Next time someone asks, “What do you do?” I encourage you to take the question as “Who are you?” and answer with pride to think beyond titles of who you used to be and who you are now.
