Intersections of My Lesbian, Feminist, and Activist Identities: Problems and Strategies in Everyday Impression Management

The question I ask myself is--how do I want to participate in my growth in both personal and public life? I have become aware that as a human being each of my life issues and problems (both large and small) that arise are all important to my growth. Do I have a (i.e., one) problem or issue that can be identified and related to the universe on a macro level, or are they several? It seems to me that all my questions about who I am and who I want to become overlap. I am not able to see each specific experience as independent of the others. Instead, I perceive each experience as a manifestation of a specific life lesson. Through my exploration of some of my previous and current experiences I hope to be led closer to this lesson. As a young adult I experienced a shift in consciousness in regards to my sexuality. Although I was able to reconstruct my self-image after this event, I have not been able to let go of the inquisitive perspective toward life that I acquired during my experience. This shift in consciousness has changed my perspective on how I view the world. Until this shift I had not questioned who I was in terms of my senses of myself and the world. This change in the way of looking at the world is like taking a phenomenological perspective toward life. According to Wallace and Wolf (1999), a phenomenological approach allows people "to question our way of looking at and our way of being in the world" (1999, pg. 253). A major implication of this shift in consciousness has been my adoption of a feminist perspective towards the micro and macro forces at work in my life. The implication of this is that I am dissatisfied with many institutions, attitudes, and actions within myself and especially in the outside world. I am stuck in a position of trying to make some sense of the inequalities that exist in society and focusing on what I can do to improve what I perceive to be unjust. In order to problematize my place in society I must begin with my selves. I use selves, in plural, rather than the singular self because I view each specific issue in my life as one of many waves of experiences that all have contributed to where I find myself today. Throughout my life I have experienced shifts in consciousness, behavior, and perspective and have experienced different versions of my selves along the way. I grew up in a white middle-class town, south of Boston, Massachusetts. During my adolescent and teenage years I experienced the "average" life of a teenage girl. I spent all of my free time with friends, drank alcohol before I was legal and had non-committed relationships with boys. I behaved like others around me and never questioned my reality. I conformed to what my family, friends, and society expected of me. After graduating, I wanted to experience life far from the small town I grew up in; so I moved to Orlando, Florida. The best way to describe what my experience was during the year I lived in Orlando is to de scribe how I identified my self with others. Lacking any social group at all I met new friends and was able to explore my sexuality in a new way. I was kissed by another woman and was shocked into relating to women romantically for the first time in my life. This revelation began a two-year struggle with what I thought was my identity. At the time I considered "coming out" as a lesbian to be a lifelong issue but that does not seem to be the case any more now that I look back. Rather I see that experience as beginning a process toward how I now view and interact in the world. The first step of this process was the epiphany that my selves had been socially constructed at least in part and I began to deconstruct parts of my identity that did not seem to coincide with how I felt. The realization that I had acquired an identity that had been shaped by my social environment and was at odds with how I innately felt sparked my opposition to the patriarchal structure of society. …