Table of Contents
The world within you
Your ideas, your opinions
The objects, forms, abstractions and stories inhabiting your imagination
Your preferences
Your aspirations
Your deeds
Your memory
Your relationships to others
Your images of others
Your emotions
Your secrets
Your impulses
Your aesthetic propensions
Your ways of organising things in the world
Identity
In the sense of a persona, Latin for a mask. The gatekeeper by which all foreign consciences need to pass to develop an idea of who you are. It is the representation of who you are that develops in their minds. The identity gradually forms by observation while living in society. It evolves by the feedback produced by how society reacts to it. Feedback is a fundamental shaping factor because the persona is meant to protect the inner world from the violence, rejection and suppression that the body can be subjected to if inconvenient things (or inconvenient in a particular time and space) are revealed.
The gatekeeper persona is made up of decisions -conscious or unconscious- on what to highlight, what to hide, what to contrive, what to lie about, what to bring up in particular moments. It relies not only in words or gestures, but the things you surround yourself with, the behaviours you exhibit in public, your clothing and other types of personal decoration, and the explanations of your role in society.
Living in transparency
The identity becomes increasingly less opaque. It is not a façade but an entryway and a seamless path into the inner world. The transparent gatekeeper empowers and multiplies things from the inner world as they become a reality within other people’s consciousness.
The transparent identity is supple and does not waste resources on masquerades, unnecessary anxieties or delicacies. While there are anxieties or delicacies that are necessary, many are remnants of obsolete defences, poorly processed experiences or misunderstood social etiquette.
Maybe the identity-persona is but a nexus to a world of potentials, a bridge to personal castles in the sky. Maybe at some point the process of developing an identity flips over its head, shifting from being additive to subtractive. Once it accumulated habits and predispositions to the point of saturation, it begins removing everything that proves to be superfluous, everything that disrupts the view to the inner world or that hinders its navigation.
An identity is like a vehicle. It ensures that the gate to the inner world remains open, so that it can gain solidity, durability and real existence as it establishes and strengthens ties with the outer world and other people’s inner worlds, becoming increasingly intertwined with them. Eventually it extends beyond the bounds of the individual to become a part of the outer world.
Or perhaps the identity is not so much a vehicle for foreigners to comfortably navigate the inner world as it is a diplomat. It guides them to the places populated by elements with which they can form the most fruitful bonds.
What kind of filter is your persona to the world within you?
-A decoy?
-A fogged crystal window?
-A refractory prism?
-A telescope? A microscope?
-A tour guide?
-A blind guide?
-A disoriented stranger?
-An alchemist? (knowing what elements of the inner world to combine with what the other person brings, to concoct explosive encounters)
-A hall of mirrors?
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