In all the rhetoric about "identity poltics" and what someone "identifies as" I find myself reflexively resisting the concept of identity. I do not resist on the basis of assuming a completely level political playing fields, or ignoring the reality of various subcultures, but simply because I am not used to being paid much attention anywhere outside my immediate family. No reputation, no identity.
I mean it's not like I didn't actually have a reputation, but it was for being a Real Smart Kid and also quiet enough to be considered mute, and retiring enough that I completley missed the boat when it came to learning how to make friends outside of specific organizational structures. So after the fourth grade I forgot about my reputation as a Real Smart Kid and didn't really have any kind of social network of peers outside of Boy Scouts, which wasn't my idea to join in the first place, so once I got my Eagle Scout Badge and took a break from that organization I forgot about my personal identity as a Boy Scout. I didn't gain another until Freshman Year of college, where my habit of playing the Recorder during Humans Versus Zombies games earned me the moniker of The Bard.
I guess that was the first time I felt like I agreed with my current quasi-public reputation enough to call it an identity. Also one of the few times in my life that I have noticed strangers speaking of me in the third person. (I don't really get this whole 'pronoun' business either. If some stranger were to ask me what my pronouns were I'd be surprised that they noticed me at all!)
I still wonder what people think of me, and yet in the times when I have an answer, I forget about it later. I don't know why it all seems to slide off. I don't know why I resist everyone's compliments. I have friends who love me and I love them and yet sometimes I still wonder what they think of me.
It is all very odd. I do desire a reputation -- I would like to be known as the local carilloneur, and hope that people bother to listen to the bells and gossip about them. But maybe I would shed that sort of identity as quickly as all the others?
Unless I am more likely to hang onto the identities that I have actually hoped to find. More than anything I want to be someone whose presence people find reassuring, and I would never dare act against such a reputation.
With that in mind, let us say that I am not averse to the concept of identity, but that I'm not interested in any of the pre-fab options.