Identity can be a powerful tool for understanding yourself, others, and basically every part of society. Our egos have a need to categorize life and simplify it to make things make sense. In addition to being obsessed with our identity, we create narratives for ourselves to live out, like little plays. Humans are natural storytellers, so we naturally have a set story for the representation of our life – not always in the sense of a beginning middle and end with specific plots and conflicts planned out, but in our expression of how we would describe ourselves and what our personality is like through application in our day to day life by mode of reactions and self expression. Some people have great control over some aspects of their narrative, using it to manipulate how they are perceived and how they fit into their own identity and aesthetic of living, and others may not even be fully aware of its existence, subconsciously submitting to a personality they accept by living out their narrative everyday. Your narrative integrates your past, present, and future, through the eyes of your identity and perceptions of what your life is and who you are. Narrative assists us in being coherent and predictable – so does this need for staying true and coherent with our identity and narrative mean we end up denying parts of ourselves, or experiences we may want to have that don’t quite fit? This is like finding clothes you think look really cool and you would want to try out, but it doesn’t match with your predetermined style. What if you went ahead and bought different clothes anyways, and from one day to the next your style is inconsistent and you portray different themes constantly. Why would this even be an issue? To the ego, identity and placement is everything, but we don’t have to sacrifice one part of ourselves to add on another. You can be professional yet playful, rugged yet chic. You can be a chameleon. We are just conditioned to be uncomfortable by this.
By putting all the experiences of human life into boxes we are restricting the ability to just be. Hindering the power of unlabeled existence. We do this constantly by clinging to specific traits, deeply identifying with something whether it be positive or negative, it is still fixed illusions. It is ok to identify with something, but don’t get trapped in these identifiers because you may keep yourself back from other opportunities to grow as a person. If you remain attached to a belief, trait, or habit that doesn’t serve you, you can become stagnant in your development and your mind will fester. We attach to fixed illusions all on our own out of comfort sometimes – for example, growing up I loved buying personality quiz books, where the pages would ask if you prefer coke or pepsi, cake or pie, jeans or a skirt, therefore training my mind to be binary. The black or whitr mindset loves stereotypes and easy decisions, not abstract emotion and choosing all of the answers instead of just one. It felt safe and nice to be told who i was and what i liked from these activity books. I got a lot of joy from it. But the choices were always illusions, and the only person to ever know most of those answers was myself as i grew up creating a comfy box for myself to live in, nurturing a binary narrative for myself and others around me. The nature of this illusion of choice can be related to the popular psuedo-science of horoscopes. Although I find horoscopes very interesting, the whole point of horoscopes is to create a narrative. The beginning of the story is your natal chart – what the sky embodied the moment you were born. This sets up your whole life for you, just as the conditioning and surroundings of your childhood does in basic narrative. Then, depending on your three most relevant signs, being your moon sign, sun sign, and ascendant, you get a pretty good glimpse of what you are like as a person internally and externally, how you make decisions, how ruled you are by emotions, and any other information that one could possibly know or strive to know about oneself. Sounds pretty great in theory, but if you wholeheartedly accept your horoscope as your ultimate truth, you become attached to a stereotype on everyone, including yourself, by clinging to fixed personality traits that distract you from your vastness and ability to create your own reality. Sometimes I am very much my virgo sun capricorn moon identity, yet I am also a lot of other things. Sometimes I want to be spontaneous, that doesn’t mean I can’t be organized. Traits exist outside of yourself, and your nature is shapeshifting – but not if you continue to put yourself in a box. There is no need to be guilty from straying from a fixed point, either. It doesn’t make you inconsistent or scattered – the fixed point never existed in the first place. To be wildly adaptive creatures and be obsessed with limited archetypes is a crying shame, and we all fall victim to it.
People are constantly evolving, absorbing more, collecting experiences, and growing. You may look back and see that you’re a different person now than you were 5 years ago, maybe even a few months ago, but it’s not a clean slate. We grow from ourselves and experiences, always having the past with us, as a learning tool and a grounding element. We collect moments, carry on, and let go of what eventually no longer serves us. However, what will no longer serve us has still been important to developments for us because not only have you grown past it, but it is an example of how you will continue to move forward through life and basically “edit” yourself. I don’t think this is necessarily an edit to perfection process, though it could be (perfection in the eyes of the beholder, of course), but a constant process of give and take as our needs and wants change along the course of our life. To be an ever-changing shape shifting force is to be free to experience life instead of trying to make sense of it. To be instead of to figure out. To feel instead of to name. Living without judgement. It is the practise of non-judgement that can assist us in growing further away from the anxious need to define and describe our entire human experience.
A quote from Heraclitus that I first heard from spiritual teacher Ram Dass is “you never step into the same river twice”, and I think of this passage a lot as the meaning holds up to the sentiment of constant change and flowing transition. The river, like all things, is always in the evolving motion. I also like to think of this in terms of a waterfall, since a waterfall is beautifully symbolic of permanence within change. The image and essence of the waterfall is the same, and you can stare at it for a period of time and it won’t be the same composition of a waterfall. It’s content changes but it is still the powerful waterfall symbol. The composition of the waterfall being different, but it still being that same waterfall is a representation of a person. The person is the waterfall and all of their past selves, emotions, identities, paths, choices, times when we have changed our minds – this is all different water molecules flowing past and through. It is not a worrying thought of personality detachment or being dissociated from who you are, because you are always you, the “i” you refer to yourself as. You are the image and symbol that is the waterfall. If anything this is freeing because you are without limit or form. You have no restrictions and you are a flowing river.
Our labels do not define us. Our familial and societal roles do not define us. Our interests, hobbies, and education does not define us. Our responses and reactions cannot describe us. We are chameleons to life, and can be what we choose, feel what we feel, free of unnecessary interpretation.
Only Sunny 