A Thorny Issue
A Rose, Some Blood, and the Need for Identity
When I moved to an apartment in Philadelphia two years ago I had to give up my lovely garden in Ithaca, New York. To make up for the loss, I set up a long row of pots of every size, shape and color on the sidewalk by my first-floor place. I had planted my Ithaca garden using lots of hand-me-downs plants so when a new acquaintance offered me a mature red rose, I said, “I’ll take it.”
I was cautioned to bring a car, or a wheelbarrow, but having neither I left the house with my wheeled shopping cart. Little old ladies drag these carts to the grocery store to buy cat food, but experience over the past year of big city living confirmed that with the help of a bungie cord or two, I could carry anything.
Together, my new friend and I struggled to lift what turned out to be a tall rosebush in a gigantic plastic tub onto the top of the cart (that’s right, it didn’t fit inside the cart). I then attempted to pull it from her backyard garden down a narrow exit to the street. The wheels of cart caught on other outdoor things stowed there and the thorny rose branches reached down and poked through my charming straw hat and pricked my scalp. It took us about fifteen minutes to go fifteen feet. Finally, we undid the pot and hand carried it to the street and then lifted it once again onto the cart. I pulled the bungie cord around the middle of the pot but it snapped out of my hand and shot my friend in the lower abdomen. The look on her face told me that the sting of that bungie cord will forever be imprinted in her memory as a day out with me. She went inside to put ice on her wound.
I started to tow the cart down the sidewalk, which I might add was brick; Philly is an old city, after all, and I was in one of its oldest parts. The cart immediately tipped over and dirt spilled everywhere. I tried to scoop it up but left an incriminating pile behind.
Eventually, I figured out that the best possible position for hauling this thing was me in front, bent forward, hat off, both hands drawn back to grab and pull the cart behind me. Soon my arms were adorned with rivulets of blood as the rose thorns kept digging into my skin. The likeness to another person long ago bent over, pierced by thorns and hauling something made from a big woody plant was obvious. I began to muse that at least no one was waiting to nail me to a cross when I got this stupid plant home.
After many blocks and more spilled dirt, I ran into a crowd. Unbeknownst to me, it was the Philly LGBT parade, and everyone was smiling and waving rainbow flags. Normally, my impulse would be to join the festivities, but instead, I had this bloody rose to get home. As yelled, “Excuse me. Excuse me,” and forced my way through the throng, I felt this surge of fury and resentment toward people I didn’t even know. It was their happiness, their togetherness, their communal joy that got to me, and that’s when the rose took on profound personal meaning. I was surrounded by people of common cause and a common belief in the nature of identity. Whereas I was hot, tired, grumpy and bleeding and had no identity at all.
A few years ago, I had retired from Cornell University and lost my persona as a professor. After that, I worked two years for Johnson&Johnson developing and implementing a project on the anthropology of parenting advice until, without explanation, it was slammed shut. Overnight, my worth as an anthropologist and researcher, and someone with a paycheck, was obliterated. Those professional losses had followed my husband’s infidelity and departure after two decades together. In that act, he smashed to bits my very self as a wife and member of a happy family. And I had recently moved from a town where I was a long-term local to a city in which I knew nothing and nobody. I was feeling especially empty that weekend because my daughter had visited, reminding me that although she will always be my baby and I will always be her mom, at twenty she’s a grown-up.
I am not starving nor terminally ill, I really don’t have much to complain about, but I had been adrift for months because, for the first time in my life, I didn’t know who I was. But pushing through a crowd with a rose in a granny cart suddenly allowed one of my old identities, that of anthropologist, to explain it to me.
We anthropologists say identity is everything, and it is. Identity is who we are, what we believe, the road map that guides our behavior and our thoughts. Sometimes we are born into an identity and sometimes we choose it, or it comes along as life goes by. One’s identity is also multilayered and can change over time or situation — mother, wife, anthropologist, whatever — but without a secure sense of identity, people go crazy. Work on mental health across cultures shows that when individuals are taken from their homeland, or their culture and history are taken from them, the rate of depression, anxiety, and psychotic breaks skyrocket, even if that person has all the material goods in the world and a brand-new identity sitting right in front of them.
Importantly, identity is also not just a personal thing, it’s inter-personal. We all want to belong in some way to some group, and this need is such a powerful human force that it must have profound evolutionary meaning. Presumably, as social animals we need each other to survive and so we are born longing to part of a collective. That belonging then anchors us psychologically and emotionally and keeps us sane; without some clear identification with others, we are instead floating, alone and unhappy. And that was me.
Once the rose was off the cart and set alongside the other plants in front of my apartment, I stood there with my shaky, damaged, lost identity and said to the rose, “It’s time. We both have to grow new identities and figure out who we are and where we belong. And one of us needs to stop bleeding.”
