Sense of Self

[Arrendis]

@Amicia_Cora

Do posters here perceive any traits or beliefs that they consider to define their sense of individual identity to the degree that the loss or abandonment of those beliefs would leave themselves being no longer recognisable as themselves? Or, by contrast, do posters here consider their sense of self to be defined merely by a sense of linear continuity in their own consciousness - malleable such that they could take any particular form and yet still be identifiably ‘them’ so long as their continuity of consciousness was not broken in the process?

Yes.

I’m not the same Arrendis Culome who flew for EDENCOM at the beginning of the invasions. In fact, close to two dozen iterations of ‘me’ have awakened, lived, and died. Not one of them was the same person as the one before or after. They were just more or less indistinguishable, from the outside. From the inside… I mean, obviously I can’t speak from personal experience prior to the last six months-ish, but well, I’m alive, they’re not, so that’s a pretty big difference right there! And each of them got to say that, in turn.

But I’m also not who I was six months ago. I’ve had experiences, learned from them… failed to learn from them… made more mistakes in that time and failed to learn from those…

Life is change. Hopefully, growth. Sometimes, decay. But always, it’s change. So how do you maintain a sense of self amidst all this change? In my case, I do it by building my sense of self around… what you might call the ‘greater me area’… like how a city has a ‘greater metropolitan area’. There are parts of my identity that are… my thoughts, my goals, my decisions in any given situation… things I’d do again, and why… things I’d change, and why…

There are parts of my identity that are how I relate to others… things that seem immutable but really aren’t, or seem ephemeral, but never were. That’s especially true as a capsuleer: the things that many people might have identified as essential bits of ‘me’… weren’t, and things many people never knew were far more central.

Then there are parts of me that are… complete fabrications, but so totally essential to my sense of self that I can’t really do without them. Abstractions and illusions… ideals and dreams. Contradictions, too.

In the end, my sense of ‘self’ itself is an illusory thing, a canard held up to fend off the yawning chasm of never-ending derivation that will, inevitably, leave me… not me. Either because I’ll change, so I’m not who I am now… or because I’ll die, and ‘me’ will be someone else. But either way, whoever that person is, they’ll be… me… to the people around me… them… er… you get the idea.

Maybe that’s the deeper truth: that ‘me’ is just the amalgam of everyone else’s experience of me.

Or, you know, maybe I’ve just got too much time on my hands these days.