Identity

On becoming your own mental point of origin

The two Fridas By Frida Kahlo - The Artchive, Public Domain,

The earth is about to complete a cycle around the sun, and being a January baby, I’m about to be a cycle older as well. This year was an interesting one, full of perceptual shifts of myself, of people, and just of the world we live in in general. I’ll be 25 in a few days and I can’t help but wonder if my frontal lobe will fully develop at this age like the girlies or if we have to wait a bit longer. 2026 is going to be my first year outside of the 8-4-4 scaffolding and frankly I’m a little bit scared. All of a sudden, I’m free (sans capitalism) to make of my life, of myself, what I want, and I’m suffering from analysis paralysis.

The central thing I’ve been mulling on, trying to write on and failing is identity. For the longest time my identity has been anchored on things I could do, things I knew, people I knew, people who liked me, etc., but the issue with your sense of self being anchored outside of yourself is that you tend to spiral quite a bit. You spiral when friendships fall apart, when crushes implode, when the feeling of crushing itself makes you want to implode, etc. It’s taken me a while, but I finally, painfully, after a lot of trial and error (and shrooms) stumbled onto the solution, to just do me. And therein lies the rub?

Cause who are you really? When no one is looking? When you finally stop caring about the expectations of people who can only look at you but can’t see you? When you finally start trying to see yourself? Who you are is that which remains after cutting away everything you have internalized as being part of you but isn’t. Who you are is the amalgamation of all your numerous appetites given form. Identity is the specific set of problems you’ve decided you want solved—and the toolkit you’ve developed, and are developing to do so.

People set their points of origin outside of themselves, to things they have no control over. Think about it like camerawork. First-person POV is controlled entirely by you, so everything is attuned to your perspective. If you don’t want to see something, you can just look away. Third person, on the other hand—which is the mode most people tend to exist in nowadays—is other people watching you, i.e., if people were watching your life as a movie. The ideal is to reorient your perspective around yourself, to become your own locus of control. But that’s not something people like to hear a lot of, because then you’ll be called selfish. It was easier when we had default systems—culture, religion, et cetera—you know, shit to blame—but with globalization and change moving at an insane pace, none of the old systems apply very well individually anymore. So you should just do you, very, very seriously.

How do you get there? I’ve come to realize it has a lot to do with how comfortable people are with themselves internally. When you’re very self-assured and someone tries to overwhelm your decision-making process with an overload of affection, or derision, or any other emotion really, it won’t affect much if you don’t already feed off their validation day-to-day to maintain your sense of self. At the same time, if you are self-assured to a decent degree, you naturally do not move from a place of need. You ask people out/call them out/disagree with them/compliment them/because you can, outcome be damned. Their reaction doesn’t determine your sense of worth. You ask, sure, but you demand nothing of anyone. You are a complete human.

It’s how friendships last years between people who only need like an hour-long phone call a week, because your identity or sense thereof doesn’t hinge on someone or something else. Of course, the only way out of the cycle of neediness and resentment is through. No amount of “I am enough” affirmations will ever get you to where you are at peace enough with yourself to be able to love people, but that’s not an easy conversation to have in this cultural moment.

In the end you need to tune your actions, not tunes up or down but tuned to you and your emotional state! And not in that pathetic manipulative way TikTok mental health girlies tell you to choose you while asking you to wait for the reactions of the people who hurt you to your glow up. I mean you need to choose you, even when it hurts to do so, because no one likes a beggar anyway—not even the beggar themselves. The entire point of working out your sense of self is to be comfortable in/with/as yourself. So you must kill identities that no longer serve you. You don’t mercilessly put it down like a dog. No, you honor it and grant the bleeding foaming poor thing a bow before you put it out of its misery. You will have expectations. You can’t ever get rid of those. You will always want other people to react and do things a certain way for you. You just will no longer need them to. And you can only really love someone when you need nothing from them, because the highest form of love is akin to that of God for his children, no? And what could he possibly need from us? God is love, after all. Then that’s what you do. And when the consequences—as they surely must—start to cause you pain, instead of overcorrecting, you check in with how you feel, and you honor how you feel once again.