Identity

Who am I? can be a difficult question to answer, but many a new taxonomy have sprouted over the years. There is an abundance of ideologies, sexualities, genders, medias, brands, subcultures, countercultures, -cores and aesthetics, millions of different things to identify with. At the tip of our fingers is not just the few individuals in our village but billions of personalities all summed up in their About me and Twitter bios. And while from this I have carefully prepared my entire life into three keywords; is this really me? No.

Well to start off, let's define identity. Many definitions may minmogrify it into a set of characteristics or unique features which make up a person, which it is in part, but it is the whole person and this incomplete. My identity is I, in entirety. So while I can be of the class of x, y, and z, I cannot be i.e. my identity cannot be x, y, and z, since it is much more. This nuance matters because the degree to which people can pick and choose their labels has gone inverse to expressing their actual identity.

The reason atomized labels are worse than macro ones is because of their lack of grey space. If I am a democrat then I could be a lot of things: I've seen democrats who are rich, poor, progressive, conservative, noble, banal. On the other hand, I have never met an anarcho-primitist, so if I am one then I must be it, that idea in its black and white. I am not it though, I am I, and I most likely do not well fit in its clean cut borders. This has two issues: first, less grey means more stereotyped, maybe a more accurate stereotype, but with less room for uncovering the truth; second, it becomes what one thinks they ought to be. I searched for this tag in the first place in order to find identity, but because I think the tag is my identity—while it's really not—my attempts to be myself become attempts to be something else, keeping my search unfulfilled.

Most of us already have terms put upon us from before we even knew what they were. And if we are searching for new ones, clearly the old ones weren't cutting it, so is the solution really just giving up? No! These labels we carry, any and all labels, all suffer from never being able to truly fit quite right. Even if we get a trillion more names of styles each person will have their own which deviates ever so slightly.

The solution, to all these ill-fitting so-called "identities," is to cast them all off! The only true you is you, which you can only happily be once you stop trying to be something else.

Labels only have one use: to condense and compartmentalize for others. To this end they ought to be as general and unrestricted as practical, and not something taken very seriously nor truly identified with. However, this is just a vestigial ritual which will probably remain for an evermore; the best label is none at all, because it is also the most accurate, least misleading, and allows others to do their compartmentalizing and condensing in the most unbiased way, fueled only by their own biases.

So the second solution, to the hopeful disposition of labels, is to ignore them. To focus not just on what people call themselves or are called themselves but their entirety. Change in collective ideas, as slow and tedious as it is, starts at the individual. Each time someone notices how ironically the stereotype fits on the person it looses a little of its power, becomes a little more grey, the home of all.