Thoughts of a Living Agnostic
I'll start off by saying welcome back to myself after a treacherous (took me a minute to find out how to spell that word) lapse and disappearance. I want to apologize to many of few followers about how I have not been in the best condition to blog due to a little sickness I had and my very badly organized schedule.
On that note, I'm back now and I will start with a more serious thought than my usual cosmo-modern-post-sexual-anti-derogatory posts. This little rant will be about personality and history and experience and everything having to do with the dreadful thought which is IDENTITY.
Who are we? What makes us who we are? No, this isn't a question to God as to "WHY ARE WE HERE GOD, WHERE ARE WE GOING?" although many of the points I might bring up do have a certain religionous aspect to them, but none directly affiliated. What makes a person who they really are?
We start off my examining the obvious and easy part: genes. People get a pocketfull of genes (saw what I did there?) when they are born, some scribed with looks, some with senses, others with thoughts and a fair amount on personality. Personality IS genetic is what I've thought to myself. Over the decades of years I've been alive, I have come to realize multiple similarities between my parents and I when it comes to a various array of personality traits, ranging from intelligence to humor to even genorosity and such. Some may argue that personality is a very complex matter that cannot be merely transmitted by genes, but many of evidence suggest that there is a clear link between sperm, egg and the way you beat your wife at nights.
From genes, people argue that personality is a question of environment, of what a person goes through as a baby, kid, adolescent, adult that all help shape him into the man he eventually is known to be. My thoughts are that we should seperate a big part of what most call personality from a notion that is beyond it. Personality is a process of thought, where you think about who you are, you have a general outline of what kind of person you want to be for a day or throughout mundane events, but it is not what guides a person to save someone from an oncoming bus or a pack of werewolves. I would call this section of our brain: the Temporary. The Temporary [T], to me, is a set of codes inscribed in our mind that we tend to never discover except in very rare events. Due to my prior example, you may be thinking T had to do with life and death situations, but it doesn't. T can range from a large number of events that most people, like I said previously, just never go through. I'm going to leave this part vague, because T is the very concentrated section of ourselves that doesn't appear too relevant in most people's identities, but sometimes it contributes a lot.
What contributes I would say the most to me is experience. You cannot define experience if you've never experienced yourself. The definition of the word is in the word itself. Ergo, the person you are is the person you become. Life happens so fast for most of the time and we usually do not have time to take our personality into account. Like I said, personality to me is a thought process. It's a what kind of person do I want to be globally, but how many people know you for more than 5 hours? They don't get to know your personality, they get to know your experience.
Let me elaborate! When an events occurs and you do not have time to think about it, you have a so called reaction. This reaction is what I mean by experience. When you see someone you know in the wild, depending on how well you know them, you may say hi or you may not. Over a period of time, you pick out the type of people you can say hello to and the rest you try to ignore or casually walk by. This begins with a reaction, and the thought process follows the reaction. Ergo, you did not have time to think about what you did, but as a person, you DID it.
Stringing all these moments together, you develop a process. You now know what to do in split second decisions ranging from saying hello to someone, to reacting when you see someone cry or to even think. We create a pattern for ourselves to live by. We have experienced a lot of events and now have reflexes in certain situations. We don't think, we just do. Our brain loves patterns and loves remembering (which is one of the reasons we dream). Therefore, unconsciously our brain stimulates us to do things we've already done because to us, repeating something is how we learn to live. When you dream, a high percentage of the time you dwell on the past or foresee the future. If not, you try to remodel your past life. Why? Because your brain unconsciously thinks about the small quick choices you've made and tries to string a pattern in you, a person in you that 95% of the population knows you to be.
This is where it becomes confusing; many people mistake the kind of person they are because of a set of choices they've made. They dwell on the past and rethink the choices they've made, usually the bad ones. This is also a gigantic factor of a person's identity: the way you react about your own decisions and events in your life. Humans spend countless hours thinking whether it's conscious or not. The person that comes out of those thoughts is another part of your identity.
Sometimes thoughts can be too strong for somebody to deal with, therefore we have a fallback. Another word I like to call fallback is inspiration. We go about our lives dealing with stressful or depressing events with a number of things that can numb the "pain". Initially a good fallback is friends and family, but after a while, problems become too complicated and/or personal to share with friends and family. Sometimes friends aren't even there because friends aren't ALWAYS there. That's a jolly myth people go about to constantly feel secure: a fallback illusion.**
The next level of identity a person gains starts coming later in life. This is where fallback illusions and depression kick in. It is also the filter of everything you've lived through and when you start understanding reality. An unfortunate flaw in creation is that almost nothing lasts forever, and so even things you believed in, relied on and inspired yourself by start to fade away. This is what sets each person apart. Our reaction to loss, disapointment, reality.
Although no ending to this post, there is an idea. Everyone is different and every dimension is not similarly defined for all. What I mean by this is that the timeframe for becoming a person varies. Some people gain their identity early on, they know who they are because they lost who they weren't. These people grow up to become the people we idolize, the people that inspire and the people that make us believe. While some people "live" early, others don't. This is the cause of half-broken dreams, altered realities, fear and midlife crises.
Concluding, my overall goal is to understand or at least help sprout discussion on how people are not defined momentarily. The struggle for identity is a relentless battle that only few prevail over. Even in times of belief, people will doubt because our mind is programmed to understand and almost nothing can be understood if not lost. To know is to ignore and to believe is to forget.
**A fallback illusion can be characterized two ways. It can be a fallback that you think is there but it isn't, like for example a dream, a lie or an expectation. It can also be more commonly characterized by a temporary fallback. Example: an insignificant friend, drugs, alcohol, etc.
While writing this post I was listening to a few songs. Music is one of my most important fallbacks and a number of song titles that came up were partly relevant to this topic. Since I am open to interpretation (or as some may call it, bullshit), I will not take away any song titles that came up while I wrote, even the songs that I skipped through or muted.
izzy806
gummygunk
amandla
dailybridgerton
prguitarman
theartofmadeline