A wise man once said “The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults.”
Studies have shown that we go through many stages of development in life, and that by the age of 10 we have developed the core personality that we will have basically for the rest of our lives. From that time we simply expand and add to our personality changing in many ways, and in these changes constantly in flux is our state of self identification. We are all many things at different times and in many situations in our lives. Many of us are parents, and all of us are the children of our parents, then added to that are our occupations, etc… These are all various identifications we use to describe ourselves, and with these ways we describe ourselves we also have accompanying mind sets that we use to determine our reactions to certain stimulus, events and situations we encounter in our daily lives.
The other night while watching a program on TV I found an example I never expected to see on such a show. I am speaking about the TV Show called Kendra, for those of you whom have never seen it, it is a “reality” based show about the life of the former Playboy “Girl Next Door” named Kendra. The show documents her life after being a playboy model and former girlfriend of Playboy creator Hugh Heffner. Recently she had released a biography about her life that tells of her life before Playboy and her problems in her early years with drugs, how she was a teenage runaway, and how becoming a Playboy model had actually saved her from a very self destructive lifestyle, as she has described in her show. Now, in this particular episode she was promoting her book and she was conducting a phone interview with a radio disc jockey, which proceeded to tell her that her days of being a Playboy model were over and that she could no longer live the life of a “party girl” because she was married now and had a child. She became very upset about this conversation and with good reason I would say, and the next day had photographers at her home shooting a layout to have published in playboy. Her husband Hank came home as this was happening and she stopped her photo shoot to talk with him a bit and when he asked the question “are you doing this because of what the DJ said?” She said yes, as that was in fact the truth.
Now this struck me as quite an interesting pattern of behavior, her identity as a Playboy model had saved her from a lifestyle that she believes would have eventually killed her, and instead she had a modicum of success that a lot of people only dream of. She has a television show where she only has to be herself, and a family where she is loved and more than wanted.
Why O Why would the punny words of a guy, who’s job is no less than to be plainly obnoxious, upset her to the level where she has to have photographers and her clothes off trying to prove that she is still a “girl next door?”
Simple, this identity saved her, it preserved her and until it was brought to her attention she had not realized that her life had changed, just like a paper cut you didn’t notice until you saw it on your finger. But because of the importance this particular identity to her and its function in her life, immediately without thought it caused her to defend it in the only way she knows possible.
Often we associate identity the various roles we fill in our lives, most common I have found that our age is one of the biggest. At 38 I find that I feel exactly as I did when I was still 21, but I have noticed that at times things I have not done for years, for instance I used to role-play various games such as Dungeons & Dragons for a very large portion of my life, if you had asked me if I was a gamer at the time I would have told you life is gaming. But since I met my wife and became a father it’s a past time I have retired and actually do not miss in my life. Some could say I out grew it, but it is better described to say that I disassociated from that identity and integrated the new identities of, Father and Husband to my self identification, which infinitely I find to be more satisfying.
What ever the case these things we do, roles in life we adopt, events that change us and teach us to react in ways etc… theses things are the make up of how we recognize ourselves, and at times can cause us to do things that are pretty extreme to defend them. In Kendra’s case she had to bare it all in order to prove to herself that she is still her, but inevitably she will probably notice, she spends most of her time doing other things, taking care of her son, writing a book, signing books, obviously she spends very little time in the Playboy mansion, doing photo shoots, and instead of partying at clubs she throws parties at her house. So is she really the same? Not really. But does it hurt to allow her to feel safe that she is still the same since she left the Playboy world? No, sometimes we all need a little time to adapt to change until it feels comfortable enough for us to admit it to ourselves that we have changed.
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