Finding Yourself is Hard

Take me to a ripperdoc, I need to swap some chrome.

Well, not literally, but like the meme says: “You best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias, you’re in one.” But if that’s the case, where the fuck can I go to get some sort of personal expression in this bitch? It’s like I’m feeling so lost within myself lately, can you relate? Like a body without much of a personality ¹ sitting inside it. I mean, I guess the sensation is hard to describe: but it’s very tabula rasa – clean slate.

A blank canvas.

Null program.

Like I could be something, if only someone would tell me how.

I mean, I don’t think that this is depression? Or, rather, if it is depression then it’s a completely new one to me. Well, not the feeling: like I said above, I’ve struggled with this feeling for a while. But normally my depression is the “apathetic” or “sad times” brand, not this bespoke “I don’t know who I am” flavor. No, it’s just what I said: a pervasive sensation of being unable to know what the “real me” is.

I guess I did sort of bring it on myself. Years ago, I embraced the nickname people gave me. And years ago I first struggled to sort out, in my mind, if there was a difference between who I said I was and who I really was. Long ago, in either early FB messenger or maybe it was over AIM, I talked through this with someone who was also going through it. Fuck, I wish I could remember the advice I gave them… it might help now. But I decided, or whatever, that there was a simple solution to my problem: I, myself, was the inner personality. I was the calm and thoughtful, and wannabe artistic, mind that pilots this meat suit… and the nickname was just the name of the public persona. The clown, the butt of the joke, the “dumb one” or whatever else you want to call it.

And it sort of helped, I guess? Like… knowing that I was myself, and that the rest was just the public “mask” that I put on to get through life and interact with people. That was almost helpful for a while, but now I think it’s come back to bite me in the ass. Because now: more people know me by that nickname than by my real name, and now I feel like I might be lost somewhere in there, swimming in an ocean of people and not being able to take off the mask. But that’s justn for now, you know?

I mean, nothing lasts forever, right?

In the end, though, that’s only part of what brings me to wherever I am today. I can’t say how I know that, but I feel like it must be the truth. I mean… everyone else wears their masks so easily that the core of my issue can’t possibly be that alone. Now, don’t get it too twisted up either: I don’t think that I’km trans. No shade to my trans friends, of course, its just that I don’t feel that this search for identity comes from the gender department. Though, it feels similar to how I would imagine that sort of a thing would. Like a consumptive sense that who I am is not who I am, or at least not in any way real enough to matter.

So, I ask again: where the fuck is my ripper? I need to swap a faceplate. Or change the look of my optics. Or maybe just run a scan and bite this virus thats chewing into my prefrontal cortex. Reboot some soft that errored out a long long time ago. Or, fuck it, lets just get another tattoo ² and feel some agency over our appearance. Maybe with enough ink, we’ll at least look unique instead of “generic everyman” base model³.

That’s really the core of it, I think: That I don’t actually feel like I’m a person in any way that truly matters. I mean, I’m vaguely “person shaped” but that might be about it. It just feels like there’s no actual identity to speak of. Nothing to point out that is identifiably “myself” despite evidence to the contrary. No style of my own, no sense of expression. Just me, myself, and whatever new hobby I’ve taken up. I mean, check the logs: it’s been 5 years (almost 6) of seeking constant stimulation or some form of expression. Almost a sixth of my life has been spent trying to get away from myself in an actual measurable way.

Perhaps longer, realistically, if you consider theater as a form of escapism in the first place. Or if you remember back to roleplay boards on forums, you could say that it’s been 60% of my life. Or at least you could make a very convincing argument for that figure. But, fuck me, now I’m just info-dumping into the void like usual instead of staying on topic. What was that topic again?

Oh yes, personal identity.

What an elusive thing to try and even begin talking about. The idea itself feels tricky to wrap my head around. What does it even mean, anyway? Like… What is a personality? I can’t point to it in the mirror, and I’m not sure I’d be able to describe what I think it is in the first place. Which, I guess, isn’t so odd of a thing for a psychological construct to be. It does make it hard to begin writing about, though. So, lets try approaching from a different angle (at the risk of rambling off topic again).

When I look at a person, for example, I have a pretty clear picture of what I consider to be their personality. For example, lets consider F██████████

• Gender fluid
• Artistically inclined
• Aesthetics as a general philosophy
• Easily stressed, but doing what they can
• Articulate in thought, if not always in communication
• Historic traumas give rise to certain dark humors and elements in their work
• Similar “shark-like” behavior (aka: Never stop doing things)
• Cyberpunk-y

Some of the above is attributed to the public persona that they mask themselves with, of course, but this isn’t meant to be a roast, nor do I intend to set out their darkest self on the public internet for all to see. However, I’m just trying to see if I can identify what about a person makes me feel that they have a personality in the hopes that I can explore what makes me feel empty about myself. Unfortunately, though, as I’ve written that above list, I can identify all (or, at least most) of the same traits within myself…

Maybe it’s not what a person is, then, which evokes “personality” but what they do? Returning to the example of F██████████

• Makes movies
• Draws for fun
• Acts
• Makes things (a crafter)
• Writes scripts

Fuck, that’s more of the same: I could just be listing things about myself… so I’m no closer to discovering what I’m looking for. Which is intensely frustrating, too, since I’m actively trying to figure out what’s so different in my own mind. So far, all I’ve gotten is, maybe I’ve just spread myself so thin that there is nothing left to see? That’s a rough idea, but fairly consistent with observation. Maybe I just became too much of everything and so there’s nothing left that feels identifiably “unique” about myself. Absorbed bits and pieces of everyone and everything else around me until I feel like there’s no truth to myself: just a collage of what I think other people want to see, or at least what they expect me to be.

Now we’re onto something, perhaps. It at least explains the disappointment I feel, and the shame that I expect to receive, any time I can’t complete a task that’s asked of me. “You know you can say ‘No’ right?” asks everyone, everytime I say how stressed out I am about needing to complete multiple tasks at once. No, actually, you know that I can’t say “No” to a reasonable request. But maybe, just maybe, that comes from not wanting to risk not being “who they think I am” – But, is that the cause or a symptom? That’s a tricky question to answer…

On the one hand, it could be that I feel that I lack a defined personality because I’ve spread myself too thin while searching to be “something to everyone” and managed to lose whatever it is that I used to be. Or, it could the inverse: I’m trying to be “something to everyone” because I’m searching for something that makes me feel unique in a way that signals a definite personality.

Or maybe this is all just pointless navel gazing; Staring into the (literal) black mirror of my terminal as I type, there’s nothing to be found except the ouroboros of ego death eating its own tail. Maybe it doesn’t matter, really, what I think I am. Because maybe, in the end, I’m nothing. Maybe none of us are anything to anyone once the day is over. Less than “two ships passing in the night” or anything so poetic, merely easily missed blips on the radars of the people we pass by: hardly noticed, barely recognized, and easily forgotten outside of the moment. A minor inconvenience at best, a major annoyance at worse, just another “thing” in a long list of “things” that happen.

Again, and this seems to be the theme here, I don’t know. I don’t know anything, and I’m leaving this article having become none the wiser, and having shared nothing new. No inner truths, no secret motivations, no explanations, and no hopeful resolution. I’m actively leaving this having made myself somehow worse than I was when I began. Sorry, I guess. You know: I was going to write this and post it, and link it publicly. But now I don’t think that I will.