Someone recently seriously told me they think Draco's enthusiastic follow-up on his dad's whole rah-rah-Voldy shtick and the Slytherin Way is "just an act"... and then I was thinking about Sister M's post, which raised the question of whether Dumbledore's apparent goody-two-shoes nodding benevolence and the way he seems to see goodness in everyone is 'just an act' (and he's really a manipulative bastard).... And this just got me to thinking about the way we -act- in general, and what that says about a character (or person).
Intuitively, through most of my woefully misunderstood-misfit adolescence I'd always thought, I guess, that it's your inner character that's 'most important', or rather definitive of who you are (the question of how to define identity probably being the overriding theme of my life so far). At the same time, I now feel everything a person does-- whatever mask a person wears, whatever stupid things they do, whatever they say they don't mean-- it doesn't matter, because it still defines them. Why they do it just places these things into context, but the fact that they do it or act like it remains monumental. So while I'm fascinated with people's hidden selves and 'real' identities, at the same time I'm fascinated with the masks we wear, and those masks defining us and exposing us, even.
I think it was James Baldwin who said, "Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." And I love that quote because it refers to the idea that we all have masks, and they are essential to defining us-- the ones we need, the ones that destroy us, the ones that sustain us-- but they all define us.
I'm the first person to say, without thinking, that the way I seem isn't really the way I am-- if you knew me, you could even say that I'm the -opposite- of the way I seem to most people who don't know me or have just met me. Most people say I'm totally different in person than online, too. And that's why it's so important, so vital for me to believe that actually, I am this person. This is me-- right now, and then, and whatever you think I am, I am. There is no one personal truth of identity-- the truth of who we is reflected in everyone we know, everything they think, everything we think or can think, everything everything-- our subconscious and conscious and ever-shifting mind, everything that passes unremembered and that remains cast in such stone that it loses its vitality and becomes an axiom that defines us beyond whatever event had triggered it in the first place-- everything defines us.
It always seems so... limiting and frustrating to me, these days, the way most people think of identity, in terms of yes and no, this way or that way-- because it just doesn't seem to be the way most people are, coming from observation. I mean, there's all this room for interpretation, but in the end-- it's all true. How do you know it's -not- true? And I don't mean in terms of the actual -facts- of what we do, but in terms of perceptions, qualities of character, things we feel. In that case, in the case of defining feelings-- that's where it all becomes fuzzy, doesn't it? We may be smart rather than stupid (and even then there are different sorts of intelligence), but are we generous or manipulative? Kind or cruel? Honorable or a dishonest wretch? It all changes with every action we take, doesn't it? It changes with who's judging, with what they want from us, with what they know of us, with what they expect of other people. It changes as we change, and it changes with what we understand of ourselves. Identity is a flimsy thing, even as it's so... all-pervasive, I guess you could say.
So I'll give you another quote, this one by Salman Rushdie: "Who am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all that I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am everything that happens after I've gone that would not have happened if I had not come.... to understand me you must swallow a world."
Intuitively, through most of my woefully misunderstood-misfit adolescence I'd always thought, I guess, that it's your inner character that's 'most important', or rather definitive of who you are (the question of how to define identity probably being the overriding theme of my life so far). At the same time, I now feel everything a person does-- whatever mask a person wears, whatever stupid things they do, whatever they say they don't mean-- it doesn't matter, because it still defines them. Why they do it just places these things into context, but the fact that they do it or act like it remains monumental. So while I'm fascinated with people's hidden selves and 'real' identities, at the same time I'm fascinated with the masks we wear, and those masks defining us and exposing us, even.
I think it was James Baldwin who said, "Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within." And I love that quote because it refers to the idea that we all have masks, and they are essential to defining us-- the ones we need, the ones that destroy us, the ones that sustain us-- but they all define us.
I'm the first person to say, without thinking, that the way I seem isn't really the way I am-- if you knew me, you could even say that I'm the -opposite- of the way I seem to most people who don't know me or have just met me. Most people say I'm totally different in person than online, too. And that's why it's so important, so vital for me to believe that actually, I am this person. This is me-- right now, and then, and whatever you think I am, I am. There is no one personal truth of identity-- the truth of who we is reflected in everyone we know, everything they think, everything we think or can think, everything everything-- our subconscious and conscious and ever-shifting mind, everything that passes unremembered and that remains cast in such stone that it loses its vitality and becomes an axiom that defines us beyond whatever event had triggered it in the first place-- everything defines us.
It always seems so... limiting and frustrating to me, these days, the way most people think of identity, in terms of yes and no, this way or that way-- because it just doesn't seem to be the way most people are, coming from observation. I mean, there's all this room for interpretation, but in the end-- it's all true. How do you know it's -not- true? And I don't mean in terms of the actual -facts- of what we do, but in terms of perceptions, qualities of character, things we feel. In that case, in the case of defining feelings-- that's where it all becomes fuzzy, doesn't it? We may be smart rather than stupid (and even then there are different sorts of intelligence), but are we generous or manipulative? Kind or cruel? Honorable or a dishonest wretch? It all changes with every action we take, doesn't it? It changes with who's judging, with what they want from us, with what they know of us, with what they expect of other people. It changes as we change, and it changes with what we understand of ourselves. Identity is a flimsy thing, even as it's so... all-pervasive, I guess you could say.
So I'll give you another quote, this one by Salman Rushdie: "Who am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all that I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am everything that happens after I've gone that would not have happened if I had not come.... to understand me you must swallow a world."
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