identity1

You gotta start with the big. You take the piece and see what you’re working with. Remove the rust. You can’t start with the small scratches; you have to start with the big. Removing material, removing rust. Then shaping. Smaller and smaller scratches until you have something clean and clear to reflect the world.

This is what I think I am doing with my life. Removing material. Seeing where we are. Rebuilding. The roots are the new understanding of my self; how I don’t fit the textbooks. Anyway.

Identity. That’s the problem.

I’ve always been confident I had some kind of identity because I wasn’t surrogating it out to a political party or whatever. But maybe my identity was just beating people at their own game; furiously showing them that I was ‘more normal’ than them. More likes. More achievements. Caring less. Never my own.

I’m growing a tree. The art last year was like a furious removal of branches to see where the rot lay. I found it. It was at the fucking roots. No wonder all those fixes did nothing; new personas and new goals, new things to hunt. Never my own, in hindsight.

I think this is what the Buddha talked about when he mentioned the extinguishment of self. Each time I have adopted one of these new personas I have optimised it (because of my neurology) to the point where I am one of the best, and then immediately lost interest. The steel wool spins, there is no more optimisation viable, it hurts, and some kind of defence mechanism encodes that activity / persona as repulsive.

I think this is what happens when someone has a religious awakening. Each time I have ‘woken up’ from a previous persona - eg. alcoholic; businessboy; athlete, I’ve kind of… stuck my head up and looked around like I’ve just come out of a dream.

But those were branches and this one feels like the trunk. It feels like I have smashed the ‘global mask’ and when I was high as fuck recently (that’s what it was guys!) I realised a lot of the quirks of my roots.

So first things first: a trunk. A persona. A real one, I guess. The Buddha said ‘there is no self’. Maybe he was talking about a global mask he was wearing having been raised as Gautama the prince.

Maybe the divine or ‘理’ or your deity of choice is just unconscious pattern recognition.

Maybe I'm talking out my arse!

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Maybe I can put values at the centre instead of people. The people were there but as a child that is how it must be. They taught you the values. The values are the most important, and they become the trunk. But because of irregular dopamine signalling, something goes wrong with the encoding of identity.

Values as the trunk, relationships as the branches, and everything else comes and goes with the seasons.

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What exactly is identity? It's not a 'thing'. It always evolves. Yet at the same time, we are labelled, by ourselves as much as others. We like to choose an identity to strive toward; some kind of fixed goal which only exists in our mind.

It's how I kept doing all the things. Paint a picture of this perfect lumberjack-dad type whatever and then put it in the drawer and 5 years later it's happened. We've slapped another surrogate identity on there.

But it was fully formed. I had the image. It was top down, not bottoms up.

That's it. Audhd and incorrect time signalling has garbled the message and a tree of identity was unable to grow coherently. Too early for a metaphor? Ok so...

Autistic people (and the Buddha!) struggle with a lack of self. They are told everyone else is valuable and they are not. People push a way of behaving onto them, and they identify this as a self, or a persona, consciously or otherwise. This is a top-down persona, and I believe - again - the lack of bottoms-up identity is what results in much internal strife.

So now I'm medicated it feels like this identity is coming together. Not as wildly as when I was high, but more controlled. There's a kind of gravity which is pulling all these disparate things together, and I think that is because time cell signalling is regular at night which is when neuroplasticity happens.

Anyway. The top-down persona of childhood means plenty of top-down personae going forward. But no identity. The roots were never nurtured.

But an identity is not a fixed thing. It's not some ideal lumberjackman. It changes and evolves as you learn and grow. And that happens whether you let it happen or not.

So the tree is growing from the roots. The branches are the personae but the trunk that supports them... is always changing and flowing into these personae. It feeds and supports them, and is made of values. And when your values change and you decide you no longer value [money] so much you [stop working so hard].

Yeah that holds. Good seed.

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