May I See Your ID?

I'm a fiction writer.  I make art out of inhabiting other people's skins and telling you what their experiences feel like.  A novelist's identity expands with every new  character who enters their interior landscape so figure in my six novels combined I have about two hundred characters.  So...who am I? Anyway, I don't believe that people find themselves as if identity is something that your fairy godmother slips into your diaper at birth. I think people create themselves by accretion. Go to war and come back with another identity keeping you company.  Get married and overhear yourself described as "my wife".  I'm going to my first reunion this year and wondering which I dread hearing:  "I didn't recognize you!" or "You haven't changed a bit!"  Frankly, you're boring if you don't add things to your identity CV. When my first publisher found out I used a pseudonym she freaked out--demanding to see my driver's license, passport, birth certificate as if my true identity would drop out of those documents. I had better be that Polish girl who narrated my fiction book, dammit! It was the first time I heard the phrase "Identity Politics" and suddenly I was an official Pollack, even though an invite to the Polish Embassy in NYC showed me I have as much to do with Polish people from Poland, as splendid as they are, as I do with the Armenian people--as splendid as they are-- down the block.  Earlier in my life, I talked to a rabbi about converting and his response was, "Why would anyone want to become a Jew?" I don't know.  I was in love with one?  I liked their taste in modern furniture and art and their political activism?  "You can never not be one, once you do this," he said.  "They won't let you. Don't limit yourself." Don't limit yourself.  That's probably why I became a fiction writer.