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Life Without Self in The World Beyond Culture

I think about my identity.  Sexuality, gender, race.  What does any description of my experience of selfhood amount to?  What defines me?  What bricks are in the wall of who I am?

It seems to be important to many people that they be able to identify themselves with or as something and that they present to others pieces in their daily lives that are probative of a gestalt self-definition.  I am fascinated by philosophical explorations of personal identity and I've thought about myself in this context for a long time.  But I've never been able to muster any enthusiasm for the idea of arriving at one stable self-definition.  I don't care who I am, or even if I am definitely anyone.  This is an innate disinterest.  I'm not talking about self-annihilation here.  I'm describing weak propriate agnosticism.  I don't care what I mean by me or what relation I bear only to myself.

I trust my senses as much as I must to get anything done. I am certain enough that I am not anyone else to avoid being mired in Cartesian angst.  That much is sufficient to resolve any personal identity crises.  I identify as myself and it isn't in me to care to explain.  Furthermore I'm not concerned with what anyone thinks about that because I don't think the issue at large is important enough to argue about.  If pressed, I'd say that I believe the self to be a dynamic illusion.  But that opinion isn't valuable to me.

At some point I began noticing other people's concerns.  Considering them left me disappointed and I remain so. The world others expect me to care about seems petty.  I don't want the things that are all other people's lives are to be all that my life is.  Work, money, politics, the hills we die on.  We obscure so much beauty.  I see a different world.  Not a better world necessarily but a bigger one.  The Other World.  The world that isn't about what we are doing.  I've always seen it.  The nightmare of humanity amid the dream of everything else.

So I don't care to define myself.  I never have, but I tried to for a long time because I thought I had to or I'd be exiled.  I have always been an outsider but I spent most of my life until now trying to get in, even to the detriment of my wellbeing, thinking that embracing others' narrow view of the ordinary was the only option.  But I'm not doing that anymore.  I'm not concerned with fitting under a label.  That concept is part of the world I don't want to be in.  That finite world of nonetheless infinite work and suffering in strife against each other.  If I must say what I am, I am the opposite of that. But that's the world of ordinary people and rejecting it means rejecting them.  My limited emotional depth and lack of motivation to bond facilitate that.  So I am now exploring more consciously than ever the isolation that comes from living beyond culture.  And I'm not finding it lonely or sad but instead I'm enjoying being what I've genuinely always thought it was only natural for anyone to be: nothing and no one for sure and forever.

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