Introductions suck. My name is blah, I do blah blah. Nobody cares because I am not Oprah. Although, clearly I did disclose that I am a lawyer so you’ve maybe got a gist of how my personality is like. Well, let us not forget the “bad” in it, ever.

I’ve always wondered the need for introductions. Getting as far as 2019, if it has taught humans anything, it is that the concept of identity and sense of background that we require, almost always leads to skewed judgements (which in a far-fetched scenario also leads to riots and wars). But without an introduction, I guess the uniqueness of an individual is absent? People’s identity is rooted in their identifications; in what they associated themselves with. What a person associates him or herself with is ultimately who that person is, for all identity is ultimately in relationship to something else. An Indian person identifies himself or herself as “Indian”, for example, and that becomes part of that person’s identity.

Yeah, so the theme of this space is going to be just a bunch of contradictory thoughts on everything and nothing spewing out of my worm sized brain. A little tea spilling about reality and probably lots of angry-tits conversations.

Assigning of a particular characteristic or categorisation to self

Lately, I have been drowning in multiple existential crises, my purpose in life, if it even has a purpose and you know, the normal usual mental break-downs that one has. It all leads to this frustration of not knowing what I want to do with my career. Now, according to me, self-identification is nothing but trying to map the patterns of your conscious and unconscious thoughts and identifying that pattern into a certain category right? For example, I will identify myself by collating and generalising all my experiences, my reactions in those scenarios and the results of those experiences. I will then take this data and dump it into this one bucket. I hold that bucket up and portray myself as the said bucket.

For example, I have been told that my bucket portrays that I am good at academics, I ask the right questions and I am a team-player. So, I became a lawyer. Now the most important question is, did I always (i.e. for most of my adolescent through adult life), know that I want to be a lawyer? Hell no. Far from it. Why, you ask? Because I never consciously saw my bucket, I did not map my thoughts and I do not see a pattern.

But all my life, I have mostly been surrounded by people who fall into one of the following two categories:

• Shape their data because they definitively know where they want to park their bucket
• Can more or less analyse the data in the said bucket, choose accordingly and be content

Identification with Nothing

Now, according to the experts that I met on google, one of the reasons for people who fail to do either of the above two, is self-doubt. However, the way we view ourselves is always going to be mildly distorted and if you can acknowledge that, I don’t know how to not doubt your judgements about self. The reason for this distorted view is quite simple, according to this Professor in Princeton named Pronin. Because we do not want to be stingy, arrogant or self-righteous, we assume that we are not any of those things. For example, we have no trouble recognising how prejudiced or unfair our office colleague acts toward another person. But we do not consider that we could behave in much the same way: because we intend to be morally good, it never occurs to us that we too, might be prejudiced.

What’s the solution to all of this then, how does one distinguish self-image from self-knowledge. A plausible answer might be that only if we separate ourselves from our ideas then we can separate our identity from our ideas. You don’t have to hold the same opinions that your identity group holds. You can think for yourself. You can search for all the information yourself and, based on your own findings, come to a conclusion by yourself. The blank slate that I possess can maybe be eliminated if I pick up the bucket and dump my own research and conclusions without a bunch of external factors involved. The data might even be gibberish but self-identification is about establishing that pattern even in a bucket full of garbage.

So, in conclusion, the problem is that I am engaging in identity politics and am unable to separate my identity from my ideas. Makes sense. My ideas are based on my perception of self. They’re usually infused together, so criticising a person’s ideas is now equivalent to criticising a person’s identity. It hurts to have your identity attacked. You believe that is who you are and, in some cases, you believe there are traits which you cannot change.

Currently, my mental struggle is excruciating probably because my idea of how a lawyer acts is infused together with my idea of how I act. The real struggle now is to separate the two and then check if the bucket is still empty.

I spoke a lot about buckets, it’s weird but I can take this off of my bucket list now. Don’t hate me, tune in next week for more goo thoughts on baskets maybe and hit me up if you want to have a conversation on any of the above garbage!

This is the first post on my new blog so don’t be mean and give me your validation. My aim is to post every alternate Sunday, if life permits. If you want to start a conversation, please subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.