Identity, culture and love

"How did an illness become an identity?"

"...and I thought, 'There it is again: a family that perceives itself to be normal, with a child who seems to be extraordinary.' And I hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity. There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child. Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion--those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children. And while some of them can be difficult, there's no attempt to cure them. You could argue that it is harder in the United States, our current presidency not withstanding, to be a person of color. And yet we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to African Americans and Asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair. There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group, and I call them horizontal identities (because the peer group is the horizontal experience). These are identities that are alien to your parents, that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers. And it is those identities--those horizontal identities--that people almost always tried to cure."