Becoming who you were born as

In 1971 a psychologist named William Cross published a model of how an identity you were born into becomes one you've chosen and made your own. He was writing about Black identity in America, and his model, which he called nigrescence, became foundational in that field. I include it here for the universal shape he found, which applies far beyond its origin.

The shape: pre-encounter, where the identity is unexamined, absorbed, perhaps even held at a distance. Encounter, where an experience makes it impossible to ignore. Immersion, where the person dives in, often with intensity, sometimes rejecting everything outside it. Internalization, where the identity settles into something secure and the person can hold it without needing to defend it or prove it. And a commitment stage, where it's turned outward into work for others.

I've watched that arc in people from every background, around every kind of inheritance: faith, nationality, a family trade, a language, a diagnosis, a calling. The teenager who wants nothing to do with his father's religion, then at thirty immerses in it completely, then at forty can hold it with peace and raise his own children in it without fear. That's Cross's arc. The immersion stage, with its intensity, often worries the people around it. Cross's model says: it's a stage, it passes, and what comes after is sturdier than what came before.

It's a Meaning key because identity is where meaning lives, and most of us carry at least one inheritance we've never walked through the arc with. We're stuck in pre-encounter, never having looked, or in immersion, never having settled.