Consider for a moment the burden of identity. Your own identity, what you consider you. Consider, for a moment how much your cherished or despised self image corresponds to the real. Is there any thread of continuity, or does it change in every moment? Is it just a flickering image, or is there any solidity whatsoever? Are we, in any way what we think we are? Are we in any way an individual? In what way? How does our psychosomatic self, correspond in any way to our real apparition. Or is that individuality a fiction?

First consider the mind? What happens in the mind? Do we have a single thought that is discrete, unique, that belongs to us. What is a though? Does a though just simple emerge from nowhere, out of the blue. No, a though is a collage of memory, learning, experience, relation — it is a web of complexity somehow emerging as something that is witnessed by us, the surface of a deeper movement, a mysterious constellation. Did we make it, or did we just witness it? Or are we a receiver.

What about the body? Did we create our own body? Did we invent our own movements? Or have we inherited the the movements from others? Have we copied the mechanical reactions, but also learned amazing agility… from imitating aping, stealing, borrowing, taking, receiving from others. How strange that we believe we are our ‘own person’ as if we gave birth to ourselves.

The combinations and constellation may be unique, but it is easy to see that we are a composite, relational, dependent — the miracle being the cohesion of so many alien, contradictory, inherited, borrowed selves. The amazing thing is we are not who we are. We are not who we think we are. We just keep pretending to be so, for the sake of function, or the sake of politeness. But it was never us, is never us. Our ‘individual’ story is not a biography of a real self, but the strangest science fiction fantasy tale ever.

After you have admitted, that your individuality is a fiction, a mythology, and in some ways a horror story, what do? Become terribly depressed? Become existentially gloomy, nihilistic, commit suicide.

No, absolutely not. This is cause for celebration! Your identity is a burden. It is always a story about limitation, tragic melodrama. It is a prison of voices, all telling you what and who you are, parental society voices, cosmic mother and father dictators trying to fix us into a limited pattern of experience. Trying to reduce you, package you, impression you with representations of you — but none of them ARE you at all.

Now that you see that your self image, your identity, is such a narrow and dead end street, you can begin to recreate ‘yourself’. The first thing to do is stop listening to people. Don’t listen to them! Even those who are endlessly well meaning, may be unconsciously trying to put you back into the cage. And it’s work not to listen to them, because they are so endlessly convincing, they have so many antidotes and advice and stories, telling you how warm and cosy and democratic the cage really is. Even the ones you love the most may be telling you that story. Don’t blame them or fight with them, but resist them all the same.

How free you will be without the burden of identity! How endless you can shape-shift and time travel and inhabit different worlds because you know that none of them are real. How you can be just like a child and put on a different costume every day, because you know that each identity is fiction. How much more enchanted is the world when it is transparent, malleable, fluid and alive. And you can finally live in the world, because you live not for ‘I’ but for the other one, for ‘You’. You is the first word of every love letter. You is the word that matters the most. Not I, but You exist. The I is the muddy pond of narcissus. There are no answers there, just endless reflections, a house of mirrors, where everything is distorted, strange and unreal.