Modern culture has offered professional identity — what you do for a living — as the organizing principle of the self, the answer to the first question strangers ask. This is a relatively recent arrangement and an unstable one: it attaches selfhood to market conditions, to the approval of institutions, and to a role that can be eliminated with a memo. Juana's identity survived the confiscation of her library; the question is whether yours would survive the loss of your title.
Juana