semi-biographical self-analysis, on identity
people seem to care a lot about their identities, gender, ethnicity, religion or political ideology and considered central and important aspects of their identities. To me, these all seem arbitrary, accidental, non-essential to my Being. I am a Southern Usian white male so maybe has something about my own alienation from my culture and ancestry or dominant masculinity, or my position of privileged led me to not have to face the consequences of my social identity as much as others, but maybe it's the other way around, and i am alien to these societal imposed identities because I do not identify with them
i think of my true self as a beam of light shooting out of a long tunnel which appears to be situated outside of perceptible reality, i.e. the timeless stage of consciousness which is without form or content, just pure perception, so my body or personality are a rather arbitrary vessel that i just woke up in, just a puppet or an interface that the perusa or spark of the divine just happened to get stuck in. I recognize myself as an entity, and any identity seems superficial compared to that.
it's why i hesitate to associate with plurality either, even tho i contain multitudes of fragmentary personae i do not identity with them, they are just like outfits i put on if i feel like it, they are not me. i suppose i do have aspects of my unconscious that i struggle with which in the past has played tricks on me but nothing so defined as a distinct personality, because my personality is just a pastiche of contradictory drives and influences.
I've often wondered if this is psychopathy. Richard Nixon famously told his therapist ( how do we know this? such medical ethics) that "when I get up in the morning and look in the mirror there is no one there", and that is literally me i don't particularly like looking in the mirror or hearing my own voice, like who, who is that creature? I don't think it's gender dysphoria either, i don't think there is some true self or gender or body i would feel right in, it would just be another mannequin.
Some people identify with what they do, i suppose i would be an artist or musician or philosopher, but i never really identified with these things, saying "I'm a musician" is just a way of saying "I like to make music" it's an external activity, it's not a matter of me feeling like a real musician, yeah i can play the fuck out of guitar, but it's not really the defining thing about me tho. Identifying with a career seems even more dreary, Class Identity feels most real to me, because i experience it, it's just "my lot in life" but at the same time it is the most accidental of everything I've just said, it has nothing to do with who I am as a person and everything to do with external circumstances and pure chance. I disagree with "class first" people is they attribute substance to class identity that simply doesn't exist, and that's paradoxically why i identify with it; it can be done away with.
