I once thought I knew who I was…until I realized that locking into a single persona can be a dysfunctional trap. Once I began exploring different personalities—being who I needed to be when I wanted—identity started revealing itself to be a functional game; infinitely varied and infinitely novel.
And oh yeah—I was also able to start writing.
Life is change. Writing is life.
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The Chameleon effect
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Why be one, when you can be all.
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Indeed, adhering to one identity inevitably leads to stagnation and limitations. I suspect that tenaciously clinging to one immutable idenitity also somewhat contributes to one being logically consistent and critically thinking (insofar as what our human minds are capable of) in a particular field of inquiry or vocation, but simplistic and logically inconsistent in others.
Also, many people who claim a certain “identity” are deriving said identity from some distorted framework of information (like media stereotypes) as opposed to essential characteristics of the very identity they are adopting.
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It’s very comfortable…until life demands something more.
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Yes. Plus, comfortability is usually boring anyway.
Your perspective of identity is also quite similar to mine in that categories of being are not so sharply delineated, but rather they often overlap and interpenetrate each other. I consider myself a philosopher, a child, an adult, a scholar, an aesthete, a voluptuary, a lunatic, a rational, a futurist, a sentimentalist, a philanthropist, a loner and many other identities, all of which recombine themselves capriciously according to the changes of time and space. Each time slice of ‘me’ is never going to be identical to its previous or next one.
And man, I embrace such changes.
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Yes. Plus, comfortability is usually boring anyway.
Your perspective of identity is also quite similar to mine in that categories of being are not so sharply delineated, but rather they often overlap and interpenetrate each other. I consider myself a philosopher, a child, an adult, a scholar, an aesthete, a voluptuary, a lunatic, a rational, a futurist, a sentimentalist, a philanthropist, a loner and many other identities, all of which recombine themselves capriciously according to the changes of time and space. Each time slice of ‘me’ is never going to be identical to its previous or next one.
And man, I embrace such changes.
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Your post seems to advocate reinvention. [Or at least, that’s one of my takeaways. Sounds good to me.]
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I’d say reinvention is inevitable. Not to get to meta, but I’m not advocating it, as it’s a default…I’m advocating EMBRACING it. 🙂
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