The other day I was watching an interview with a sportsperson who was talking about his ‘community’. It got me thinking. Who forms my community? I found that I couldn’t locate my community easily.
I feel more like an interloper. Just passing through.
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Christians? I am not a believer. Keralites? I’ve never lived there. I barely speak the language. Male? I’ve been told I am not a typical male. Writers? I don’t know. The ones I meet, I don’t seem to have much in common with them. Bangaloreans? I don’t think I feel close enough to the culture. I feel more like an interloper. Just passing through. Advertising? I don’t know again. I don’t seem to share the easy ambition, the healthy cynicism. So, for the question, “Which community do I belong to?” the only answer that came to me was, “None”.
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I belonged to no one and nowhere. I was a community of one. A sort of aberration. There was neither narcissism nor martyrdom in that realization. Just a blank-faced recognition of the fact. I realise it’s true; I look around and I can’t find ‘my people’. I can find parts of me here and there. A passion for literature. The ability to do nothing all afternoon. A love of sambar. But they’re pieces, not the whole. My identity appears to have no roots in a known tradition and hence, no traceable path into the future. No reference point. Suddenly, I felt very alone.
You’re just making yourself up as you go along.
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How did you get here? I asked myself. And a chill went through me as a probable answer popped into my head: You just made yourself up. You’re just making yourself up as you go along. I have no words to describe what I felt when I realised that. It felt both insincere and real. It felt like I was committing a crime while doing something seemingly inventive and brave. Like a man who clears a path in a forest, only to be accosted by forest officials who tell him he’s illegally cutting down trees. The roots of this ambiguity towards self, this fear of self-change started to emerge more clearly to me in my mind’s eye. I realised that, unlike in our time now, when the process of self-change has become normalized, I grew up during a time when the creation of an original self was viewed either as an act of treason or as an act of bravery, nothing in between.
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If you broke the pattern and distanced yourself from the community of your birth, you were either a terrorist or a freedom fighter. But you were never simply a person, trying to find their place in the world. And that’s why I felt scared and guilty for so long, for steadily casting off all my previous allegiances. But I don’t feel guilty or lost anymore. I realise now that I don’t owe anyone an explanation for the complicated identity I have created for myself. I don’t even have to answer to my own self. Because the need to create one’s own identity is a right that was always kept hidden from us. I am just a person. Trying to find his place in the world. That is not a crime. That is not even betrayal. That is normal.
First published in Labyrinths
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Photo: Wikimedia/ Tom Corser
“You’re just making yourself up as you go along” – brilliant! Love that line… as I feel, that’s exactly the point, but there is no point to actually decipher only the reality chosen, discovered and found. Guilt passing, is like saying goodbye to an old friend.
A Good Read Phillip
“But you were never simply a person, trying to find their place in the world. “And that’s why I felt scared and guilty for so long, for steadily casting off all my previous allegiances.” Ya know, I’m having one of those rare “down” moments and needed something to lift me up. This may be it. You’re not alone, guy, but you are ahead of the curve. There’s something in the air that only the most astute, observant are sensing. Countless numbers of men across this land are feeling the same thing. Most are still in that very “guilt” stage, and… Read more »
We’re reading out of the same hymnbook, DJ. I agree, we are definitely at a major inflection point. Basically, it is my observation that MOST men are just done with the dark side of feminism. Ding, dong the witch is dead. Mostly men are saying “fuck the collective”. I’m an individual dammit, and I am not going to let some outside force or group or individual define who I am, how I should think, how I should feel, how I should act – and what it is that defines my personal experience of identity. Anyone who wants to do that… Read more »
Well, obviously you’re a white male, so check your damn privilege.
Does anybody else see what an idiotic, counter-productive idea “privilege” really is?
Enough is enough. SJW’s nobody is buying what you’re selling.
Your intent is good, but the whole idea is not “skillful means”, as the Buddha would say. It creates more fractiousness, more dissent, more confusion, more delusion.
As for you, Phillip John: Good on ya! You do you!