i’ve been contemplating what my first post should be. ideally, this post would neatly encompass me as a person, but i’ve always struggled to describe who i am. funnily talking about this would probably be a good introduction to me?

i mentioned on my homepage the frustration i have about being inarticulate. that same frustration extends to my inability to conceive who i am as a person concretely. till this day, i often still struggle to consistently describe myself to others. conversely, if you asked people i’m close with to describe me, you’d probably receive varying answers.

when i was younger, i’ve always felt suspicious (bordering on cynical) whenever person A would comment on person B’s personality, then person B would conform to it. is person B truly that way, or has surrounding opinions shaped them into acting that way? akin to a teacher with a reputation of being scary, i used to wonder if they genuinely liked being that way, or did they feel pressured to act the part.

in science it was clear what counted as and voluntary actions. peristalsis is involuntary. queueing for ultra cute chiikawa plushie is voluntary. classifying actions seemed simple then, but it grew harder with time. i assume there is some level of intention behind every action, and perhaps that intent could be used as a scale to measure how “genuine” a personality trait is. then again, classifying daily behaviour as either “voluntary” or “involuntary” to determine our true selves might be a false dichotomy to begin with? it was (and is) difficult to properly frame these questions to seek satisfying answers. i was never happy with what i read or what people told me - until i watched mindhunter in 2017. when the book “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life” was mentioned, i remember thinking, “this book is going to answer all my questions!” well… it did not (forgive my golf ball sized consciousness), but it did give me a good starting point to broach this topic.

the mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

erving goffman compares our presentation of self to a theatrical performance. consciously and subconsciously (which is probably a better way to put it than than “voluntarily” and “involuntarily”), we are driven to perform in ways that feel familiar to others and to ourselves, you can think of this as our public persona or social role. my crude takeaway from the book was this: i treated the discrepancy between our performance in front of an audience (front stage) and when we are alone (backstage) as proof of disingenuousness. i assumed that only our behaviour when we are alone and relaxed is genuine, which is a cherry-picked oversimplification of the book.

other things in life did give me a more nuanced view, e.g. learning about concepts like foucault’s panopticon made me doubt even the genuineness of our backstage performances. since we are constantly self-policing and, in a way, are our own audience, how much of this “social intuition” can be counted as sincere? do i really like playing the piano, or do i practice simply to feel good about it? when IU released Palette and spoke about comparing herself to a palette instead of a singular plain colour, it inspired me to think less rigidly about what our “true selves” are. perhaps varying shades of colours and intents represent our daily performances front and backstage. for now i think it isn’t wrong to say: yes, they’re all me!

Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.

— Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus

randomly thought of this after writing: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60841708-the-you-you-are