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Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as a trainee TA, I had online TA experiences. My first encounter with my classmates and all the familiar faces that only appeared as square boxes on the screen of my laptop was at the MLL-2023.
By interacting with the TA community in a multicultural and multi-levels of learning, I was stimulated and enriched in my conversation and learning about issues of power and identity at the personal, professional, and community levels.
As I thought about the subject, I realized that power and identity are intertwined and have a big impact on my community, and my personal and professional life.
When we talk about power, we mean the capacity to exert influence over others, whereas when we talk about identity, we mean the sense of self that is particular to a person or a group. As I mentioned Power and identity have an impact on a person's behavior, decisions, and interactions with others on a personal, professional, and community level. A therapist's identity and sense of empowerment are crucial to his/her psychological health in a therapeutic setting. At the community level, identity and power influence how people interact with one another and the larger social systems they belong to.
Although the external community seems to hold the majority of the power, I have also discovered through the process of multi-level learning that my empowerment and sense of identity have control over the internal processing and self-realization of the context based on my identity. I also came to the conclusion that belongingness, or the feeling of being in a group or outgroup, can be defined more internally than externally.
I learned during MLL that it is completely normal for the community to offer me a variety of ideas, but it is me who gets to decide which ones I want to own. Therefore, how I choose to own or disown them is a personal decision that is shaped by my identity and provides me with the courage to face the outside world.
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