It’s more complicated than you’d think.

I’ve talked in the space before about having a rather fluid sense of identity. And that can be a great tool for being adaptable enough to sacrifice surface ego – like letting the other person think they have won – in order to pursue my own goals.

All the while secretly laughing at them for being so easily manipulated, of  course.

And I think it also lends flexibility to my mind. My mind, metaphorically speaking, can flow into the tiniest of crevices and explore the subtlest of ideas because, like water, it can seep through any crack and flow through any opening.

But I think my kind of mind comes with its own weaknesses, and those are what I am going to talk about today.

The first and most important weakness is in my sense of identity. When one can change shape at will, who’s to say who you really are? I often wonder what I am, let alone who.

I can be so many things!

The only solution to that issue is to remind myself that all the things I can be are merely facets of the jewel that is me.

That closes the gap but it’s not very satisfying.

Because without a stable sense of self, I have no solid ground to stand on. I am at the mercy of the wind and the tides. You need a good boat beneath your feet and a warm dry place to call home before you can tame the turbulent waters of my inner life.

What’s more, when you lack a stable identity, there is nothing holding you together. You are a liquid without a container. The only way to hold yourself together is to constantly invest a tremendous amount of energy maintaining your shape by sheer force of will.

In fact, maintaining any particular form requires a huge amount of energy.

And that is so very very tiring that you are liable to take the first container that comes along and stay with it.

Oh, but it’s not even that simple, because at the same time as I long for a good container, I fight against any kind of restrictions on my autonomy. I am my own person and I will not be bound by any label, category, tribe, group, team, side, summary, generalization, or type.

In fact, none of the usual lazy shortcuts people use in order to keep from actually getting to know one another work on me.

Thus, I force people to treat me as an individual.

And that would be fine, except that it tends to run in the exact opposite direction as my need to find a container I can use to define.

That’s one of my primal paradoxes : I have many more.

Getting back to the title of this post, another consequence of my fluidity of identity is that, coupled with my high level of empathy, it makes it very hard to figure out where I end and other people begin.

This came up in therapy today. I told my therapist about how hard it is for me to do things which I know will upset people. With my level of empathic sensitivity, someone else being upset makes me upset, and if I know that they are upset because of something I have done, the guilt amplifies the effect until I am more upset about whatever it was than the person in question.

This gives me a pretty strong incentive to be nice to people and to want to make them happy. The problem is. sometimes life requires you to upset others, or at least risk it, in order to pursue your own best interests.

Historically, I have not been very good at that. Other people’s feelings easily swamp my own. It’s so much easier to minimize my own needs and put other people’s temporary comfort over my long term well being.

When your identity is liquid,. you tend to go with the flow. Water, after all, seeks its lowest level. It is a slave to the forces of gravity and fluid dynamics.

It doesn’t decide anything at all.

This permeability of mine is not healthy. I would be a much saner, stabler, happier person if I could just pick a general shape and then solidify it.

Only then could I relax enough to melt into a relaxed puddle, secure in the knowledge that my container will keep me together without my having to do a thing.

But in order to get that, I would have to figure out how to tame this restless willfulness that makes me fight being defined so hard.

It’s the main reason why I am not, by nature, a “joiner”. I can’t be part of anything that requires a lot of sacrifice of individual identity, and places limitations on my autonomy.

And that covers a lot of ground.

I know that this bloody minded determination to be myself is, past a certain point, absolutely bonkers insane to be point of being downright suicidal on a metaphorical level. It is a form of fanaticism, in the sense that it is an ideal to which I am so passionately and vehemently dedicated that it blinds me to my own self-interest and makes me willing to sacrifice anything in its name,.

This comes across as radical egotism to some, and I can’t argue that it isn’t. All I can say is that being radically dedicated to one’s right to define themselves does begs the question : what exactly does one do with all that autonomy?

In my case, the answer is “not very much”, and that’s the ultimate bitter irony of this whole deal. This ferocious individualism only manifests itself when my autonomy is threatened. Without a threat, I go right back to being a puddle.

The only solution is to find a power source for my little boat strong enough that I am no longer at the mercy of the wind and the tide in this, the doldrums of my life.

I know what that power source is : passion and other strong, id-oriented emotions.

And I am increasingly in touch with those emotions and I can feel their power.

All I need is the courage and fortitude to act on those emotions.

And I am just not there yet.

But I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Here’s the thing.

As patient readers know, I was raised without religion. We didn’t even have a “technical” religion, as in “Well, I guess technically we’re Catholic… ”

What I am saying is that there was no house of worship we “should” be going to but never do because church sucks. ^[1]

My mother had abandoned her Catholicism when she was a teenager, long before any of us kids showed up. And she did so consciously and deliberately. She didn’t slowly drift away from the church.

She left in a huff and never looked back.

So my embrace of religion might come as a surprise to some, but know that I am not accepting the existence of an omnipotent father deity with an oddly erratic parenting style. I am not capable of that.

If I ever believe in that sort of thing, it will be a conscious choice to believe in something because it makes me feel better, and nothing more.

But that doesn’t mean religion is wrong about everything. There are a lot of very good and valid concepts buried in the inner workings of the three big monotheisms, and I think it would be a mistake to throw them out with the proverbial bath water.

So here’s the ones I believe in.

I believe in sin. Not in the sense  of it being a negative number on your ecclesiastical scorecard, but in the psychological sense. A person sins when they act against their own beliefs. This “sin” will remain in the mind of the sinner until something is done about it. Sin is, in essence, the persistent form of guilt.

Speaking of which….

I believe in guilt.  Guilt got a bad name because a lot of bad religion made people guilty about far too many unimportant things and for the victims of this abuse of guilt, the only way to escape it is to abandon guilt entirely, at least in theory.

But guilt is a very important emotion. Guilt and anticipated guilt are the muscle and bone of morality. It’s the emotional enforcement wing of our ethics, ready to dole out the punishment for doing that which we know to be wrong.

Guilt is not the brains of the morality operation – that job tends to go to a melange of what we’ve been taught is right and wrong and what we have figured out on our own – but it is the heart of it.

Guilt can be a good thing.

I believe in confession. I consider the Catholic ritual of confession to be one of the most brilliant bits of folk psychology ever. People need a way to deal with guilt and the Catholics have a method. You confess, thus relieving you of the tension that comes with keeping a guilty secret. Then you perform a symbolic act of attrition which often involves a form of the mantra repetition method of blanking out the conscious mind and letting the subconscious do what it needs to do in order to heal itself.

I abhor the concept of original sin and I deplore all the ways Catholicism has made people feel guilty for merely being human, but when it comes to confession. I think they are right on the money.

But what about when the guilt and the cognitive dissonance associated with it, gets so bad that it becomes a crisis?

Well, religion has a cure for that too.

I believe in salvation.  When people are overcome by their feeling of sin and guilt and run out of ways to run away from themselves, it puts them in an extreme state of mind where their psyche is particularly open to change and where the conscious mind has been subdued. This allows the mind to relieve itself of its guilt in a massive burst of unimpeded emotion, and the enormous relief caused by this release is absolute bliss to the person and with that bliss comes the strong urge to thank someone for it.

Religion gives them someone to thank.

Now where this relief “comes from” is irrelevant. I think it comes from a buildup and release of electrochemical potentials in the brain , others ,might think it’s God, others Allah,and so on. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the human mind has the capacity for this kind of transformation, and I think this capacity should be both nurtured and trained.

I also happen to think that this capacity of ours is heartbreakingly beautiful and it makes me happy-sad to think about it.

I believe in contrition. To be specific, I think the only known cure for guilt is right action. Ideally, this should take the form of actually repairing the damage you have done via your sin, and thus, repairing the injury to your psyche as well.

However, there are many sins which defy contrition, and for those poor unfortunate souls plagued by this unresolvable guilt, symbolic acts of contrition are needed.

This should take the form of something as close to repairing the damage as possible, even if it’s only done in symbolic form.

And I believe in God.  Not as a magical sky god, but as a way of personifying our highest ideals in order to give us something to strive towards. Societies need this kind of ultimate inspirational ideal to act as a beacon that shows them the direction in which they want to go.

They also need comfort in times of trouble, company when they are alone in the world, the feeling of safety that comes from believing oneself to be protected by a powerful alpha male, someone to praise for the good times and curse for the bad, and dozens of other functions that religion performs for people.

Therefore, I believe in religion.  Nothing else could possibly take over all of those jobs all at once.

I might not believe in the literal truth of any mystical religion.

But I do believe religion does a lot of good in the world.

And I wouldn’t take that away from anybody for anything.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.