January 19, 2008 Identity Crisis While I traveled through Eastern Europe, the first question people asked me was, “Where are you from?” I say New York…choosing to claim a popular region rather then my less than popular nation. Then they want to know my ethnicity. “I’m a mutt”, I tell them. The next question might be what religion I am. “I’m not religious, but I grew up Unitarian”. “Is that Christian?” “Sort of… the U.S. version is a mixture of beliefs but you aren’t require to believe in any of them” (this is a very foreign concept). “Well, what do you DO? What’s your job?” This is an uncomfortable question for me since ‘what I do’ is the part of my identity that I have most identified with and it’s in limbo too! But I have an answer that I sometimes wonder if I didn’t just make up to hang onto some semblance of identity. “I don’t have a job right now, I’m traveling for the year but I’m working on a project. I’m making a film about cultural and personal identity as expressed in textiles.” The only answer I have that identifies ‘Who am I?’ is that I am working on a self-motivated project about other people’s answers to the same question!(more)