Who the hell am I?
If you have the Substack app installed on your phone, you might have seen me messing about with chat recently where I asked people what they’d like me to talk about. This one’s from M, who also writes on Substack (go and check them out here and give them a subscribe - yourtrueself)
M asked me:
If I ask you to remove all the caps that you are wearing, like you are someone’s parent, sibling, child, an employee or employer…if you are going to remove all these caps, then who are you?
That’s a really powerful question. Like, fuck, who the hell am I when I take away all of the comparatives and the labels and the frames of reference that I can use to identify myself? When all of that is missing, what can we use to define who we are?
I guess the first question I have to ask here (just to get you thinking) is what is identity? What yardstick(s) do we use to understand who we are? What’s our go to frame of reference?
M’s question is interesting, in that we so often use the idea of labels to define us because they’re easy. It’s easy to understand ourselves in the context of a parent, or an employer. There’s a prescribed construct that we can understand and operate within. If I’m a parent, I know my responsibilities and requirements. It allows me to formulate a plan, to behave in a certain way and to know what it is that I’m supposed to be doing in the guise of being a parent.
The same for an employer. Or a psychologist. Or a writer. Or a bear trapper. There is a concrete set of parameters. Requirements that we can work towards, and outcomes that we can expect. Milestones we can meet and measure our performance against.
Yet take those away, and how do we measure ourselves? Who are we when we are floating in the void, abstract and beyond any sense of definition?
Do we turn to characteristics to define who we are? I’m compassionate, I’m happy, I’m cognisant, and good at solving problems.
Nope. Characteristics are no different to roles. Being compassionate is no different to being a parent, in the sense that it’s just another definition that we can strive towards, Another yardstick for self measurement.
Take all of it away. Remove the occupation, and the points of character, and the reassuring sense that we can fit ourselves into a disclosed ideology. Who the fuck am I when I’m hovering in a vacuum, bereft of frames of reference?
It’s a tough question to answer, isn’t it? The problem we’ve all got is that we exist within a comparable world. There’s no up without down. No strange without charm. No wet without dry, or soft without hard. We’re inherently trained to operate within the boundaries of constructs. Taking those away is like pulling the rug out from under us - we end up on our arse staring at the ceiling and wondering what the hell just happened and who’s the fucker who pulled the rug?
My thoughts are that we’re all very uncomfortable with just being. Sitting in space with ourselves, without judgement or expectation. Who’s the person that we are when we’re engulfed in silence? Who are we when we exist outside of boundaries or constraints?
That idea, when I first came across it, was deeply terrifying. An unsettling space that rattled my ego, for the ego requires definition. The self needs a reflection to compare itself against, otherwise what is the self?
So many questions. When will I get to the point? Maybe there is no point. Maybe the point is simply to be. Maybe we need to start using ourselves as the mirror, and not the world around us. Strip down the scaffolding. Tear at the foundations. Float in the salt lake and gaze at the stars.
Perhaps identity is a cosmic joke. Perhaps we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here’s Tom with the weather.
Much love
David