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.