professional identity

I'm nearing the end of my CPE experience, and it's time to start consolidating my learning. One of the things I've been working on is professional identity. I've gone from very rigid, judgmental notions of professional masking to something more flexible and personal.

My supervisor calls it the flow between principles and narratives. And I've been to both extremes. I've been to the place of rigidity where principles hold above all else--but this leaves me an isolated shell. I don't show up with my own personality and experiences, and I end up holding colleagues and patients at an unhealthy distance. And I've been to a place where all that matters is story and feeling. It's a reaction, to defy principles with personal stories, where if someone feels uncomfortable or put out, trash the principles. This results in betrayal of internal values, too much information, and self-centeredness. This was my reaction against the church and society of my childhood--when personal experience and principles didn't match up, but the pressure to maintain the image of conformity created rot on the inside. Now I'm somewhere in the middle, trying to figure out my internal principles and values and how they interact with my professional self, which is not the same as my social and private selves, but not entirely distinct from them. It's about bringing my whole self to work without violating my own and others' boundaries.

This work in CPE has challenged me in that, because I have to develop skills in reading when to reveal aspects of my story and experience while maintaining focus on the job (or patient, as the case may be). My supervisor challenges me to consider this particularly around sexuality. There are times to reveal and times to hide my sexuality, and I need to maintain boundaries around how I talk about my intimate and romantic life. Yet I don't want to leave my sexuality behind--that amounts to closeting, and I've seen plenty of examples of the long-term damage that does. I am maintaining it better--I talk with colleagues about my relationship with my partner, but I don't share intimate details of course. I rarely do with patients, but there have been a few times when patients want to talk about relationships and it resonates to share select lessons and experiences. I do not hide my sexuality at work, even in a place where I am legally but not always socially protected (reminds me of Bishop Tutu quoting Martin Luther King Jr.: "I cannot legislate you to love me, but I can legislate you to not lynch me."), but I also don't discuss it with everyone. My identity at work is not primarily as a gay person, though it obviously contributes to my perspective and experience.

I also think about my sexual self in a broad sense--as relational and sensual. In my work, how do I notice, create, and maintain relationship? How do I notice the significance of bodily experiences and senses? And I would say that the most important way my sexuality shows up at work is in that dynamic I talked about--between narrative and principle. I have experienced the disconnect between social principles (girls are for dating and boys are for being friends with, for example, or families always stay together) and personal experience (I fell in love and made friends with both boys and girls, for example, and my family was decidedly not together, for very good reasons)--and so I have a sensitivity to when others experience that. It contributes to how I interact with principles and personal stories, as well as to how I form and maintain my own values about humanity.