A few months ago, I listened to a piece by Sarah Hepola on an embarrassing mistake that she made online in which she said something that hurt somebody else. In the piece she said, “I’m a nice person but sometimes I do not nice things.” How can this be? How can somebody behave one way but “be” another?
“I’m a nice person but sometimes I do not nice things.”
When you don't know someone only way that you can get to know them is by their behavior. But what if their behavior is not consistent? Either with their view of themselves or just in general? That person may already have a well-developed sense of what their identity is. You begin to develop a sense of what their identity is to you. And for both identities, there will probably be… deviations. So what is it that you’ve developed as an identity for them in your head? It's a shorthand developed during a short period of time that you're using to save energy on not continuing to gather new information.
Whether a developed identity is for you or someone else it's a trap that can be very difficult to get out of without a dramatic change. Most people don't change dramatically in a short amount of time, so we retain mental models of them for years that become more and more obsolete. Social media in particular is well-attuned to giving us a small, high-impact snippets of one another that encourage us to label each other with a permanent identity.
Identity is not universal or static
I recently discovered the concept of Anattā, a Buddhist doctrine that we do not have a fixed self. This idea is ancient, but I’m amazed by how much of the media and culture I regularly encounter is antagonistic to it. We’re bombarded by phrases like, “Be true to yourself,” “Find yourself,” “Be your best self,” and so on. What if the reason that you haven’t found yourself yet is not that you’re on your journey to you, but that “you” don’t exist? What if the more you get to know yourself, you’re not finding out more, but just congealing?
We’re also given these maxims of “when you find out who you really are.” “You find out who you really are when your back is up against the wall.” “If you want to test a man’s character, give him power.” What if you find yourself in one of these situations and you don’t like what you see? Are you hopeless? Is someone else?
The second season of Invisibilia is exploring many concepts around identity and personality, most notably in their episode “The Personality Myth” in which they visit prisoners who have done horrible things, but have changed to the point where they don’t even identify with the person they were when they committed the crime. Viewing this idea through a moral lens, we see people go “the other way” too, from upstanding citizens to evil. Both are disconcerting to us because we’re forced to reinvest energy in “figuring someone out.”
Giving up on identity
The alternative to identity is observation. Be willing to spend time and attention with yourself and others to watch how you behave. The more you are able to see, the more choices you will have. Who is making observing and making choices? I don’t know. But so long as those choices are not hurting others or yourself, it doesn’t matter.
