“Personal Identity: Explore some aspect of your identity about which you’re curious, troubled, conflicted, or unsure.”
You read the prompt. You read it over and over. And all you can think about is…
That you hate writing about yourself.
You hate it.
You remember writing your college essays, answering eternal questions of: “What do you love?” or “What challenges you?”
You felt that everything you wrote was:
Not authentic.
Cringey.
Hypocritical.
You prefer to explain things figuratively through metaphors, beautiful adjectives, and personifications, maybe that could make your texts more valuable.
You hate yourself for thinking that way, you are frustrated because it sounds like you are trying so hard to seem unique. But you know…. Inside…. it’s more than that.
You remember staring at a wide-eyed psychologist, as he asked you to talk to him as if he were your younger self. You couldn’t. The words twisted in your throat and came out in someone else’s voice. Someone completely alien to you. Because that is who your younger self is to you. Someone else, left in the past. No connection whatsoever. To this day you still haven’t been able to do it.
Another psychologist told you once that you viewed yourself as someone with fragmented identities. Sprinkled selves separated through every move to a different country, a family divorce, and therapy sessions. So many years of psychoanalysis, to a point where you feel like you know yourself so well that you don’t want to think about it for another minute. You ask yourself, “Does that make sense?” But then you wonder if you’re just rambling.
Does this lack authenticity?
Are you cringey?
Hypocritical?
And the spiral starts again….
So when left with no other choices, you realize that maybe, just maybe, you could write about that. Try to understand why it is so hard to just sit down and write about yourself. No metaphors or outlandish ways to avoid saying the simplest things. Just write about how you can’t write.
You think you can do that.
So you try and begin…
You start at the part that makes you most uncomfortable. The part that paralyzes your poet’s pen—that pen that usually overflows with purple prose. It’s the autobiographical aim, the invitation to carve into your soul in order to answer a vague question with one whole, direct answer.
When producing a self-narration you are supposed to display “a language that speaks of and constructs identity and which is, simultaneously, creating and presenting a sense of self”1 But what if you are yet to decipher that language itself? What if the language that constructs this ‘sense of self’ has so many variants that it has become a fractured one, representing, in itself, a fractured self?
The way you spoke to the world as a child is now a faraway memory, an innocent dialect too foreign to understand eighteen years later. Now words have twisted and turned, confused by your bilingual mind that mixes Spanish and English. Any “life of living across languages can leave a child with a fragmented sense of identity,”2 and you are one of those children. Throughout your life, the language of your identity has evolved and adapted to where you were living. Every move, from place to place, marked a breaking point. It represented the death of one identity and the rebirth of a new one. Each branching dialect carried on the trauma of every move, forever changing the way you spoke every single time. Thus, now you see your life as a timeline of deaths and rebirths, every time with a one-way airplane ticket in hand. It is a eulogy you can give by memory. Every death leaves behind an old sense of self and allows the rebirth of a new inner dialogue adapted to the new context you found yourself in. So how are you supposed to establish one language of identity when its grammatical rules and structure are always changing? How are you supposed to do that when, at each point in life, you have spoken different versions of a similar dialect?
In your own mind, your complete identity is a thing so far away, so complex that you can only imagine it figuratively. Perhaps, your form of self-narration is one that “attempts to produce a new form of autobiography where past selves are critiqued and identity can be seen as fluid and fragmented.”3 But then again, the question there is…. Are you willing to open up the fragmented bits and pull them apart to find a whole answer? Is that even possible? To find one language that will explain all of these fragmented pieces of identity. To decipher the lost dialects left behind from pain and fear? To examine the origin of the lingo you speak now which would have scared your past identities and their own dictionaries? You worry that it might not be authentic, that there is no way to be able to express, in your current place and time, how your inner dialogue was expressed when you were smaller. You feel like you are betraying that little girl.
Maybe the only way to view your current identity is to see it as one that has evolved throughout your life. That could be the only way to see yourself as whole, even if not authentic. Maybe you now see that the abandoned inner dialogues of before, ones so different from those of the present, were necessary to leave behind so you could actually grow to have the inner dialogue you are having with yourself now.
It seems, to you, that maybe you can’t write about yourself because it is scary to confront the abandoned tongues of your past selves, that you can’t find a cohesive way to talk about all of the ways your mother tongue has changed, and in a way, you are ashamed that it has so much. Because, through all of the change, your past self would not understand the language your present identity speaks today, and putting it in writing would be too much of an exposure to all the metamorphosis that has occurred in times of change. So you prefer for all that change to stay lost in time and space, because lost words and languages are left behind for a reason….
The unanswerable rhetorical questions?
Not authentic.
Cringey.
Hypocritical.
You are distancing yourself again.
Rambling on and on…
Just say it with me:
I don’t like writing about myself because it makes me consider parts of me that I don’t want to think about….
Sometimes, when looking within is too hard, you decide to look up. Up at the constellations of stars and energy.
Sometimes, it seems that connecting dots is easier on a practical chart.
Sometimes, it’s easier to explain the stars than to explain oneself in simple adjectives.
The sky is more mythical, magical, and abstract and yet at the same time you can see it. Seemingly the perfect metaphor.
You can trace the constellations with your own fingers, go back and find their meanings.
Instead of writing your own identity, you let the stars write it for you so you can read it back.
Astrology “sutures experience, possibility and choice, offering elective biographies, thereby contributing to the project of self-identity.”4 Thus, this pseudoscience breaks down parts of your personality into small parts, it allows you to find these fragmented pieces of your identity in an organized manner, allowing you to see how they interact.
You remember first sitting down with your astrologer, Susana, when you were only fifteen years old. Still very lost and worried, going to therapy every Monday, and a doctor every other day to see if someone could give you answers about your chronic sinusitis. Taking any deep breaths was hard back then. It was a two-hour discussion… The solace you found in a small astrological chart was immense and unpredictable. Yes, you hate how cringey that sounds, the need to run towards the stars to understand who you are.
But… that experience changed the way you saw yourself. Well, not really changed, but it gave you a way to explain it, it gave you reasons for your personality that you had never had the words to talk about. Through the dissection of the astrological chart, the blockage that prevents you from autobiographical reflection in writing is erased, and ‘magically’ reveals tensions within your own biographical narrative, helping you to find some sort of self-identity.5 Thus, when having to combat the cracks of your fragmented identity the chart seems to be a way to look at something whole that can explain fragments. So… astrology became the fixed dictionary to explain yourself, so that as you changed, a cohesive language would follow you, written in the sky’s blue paper lines.
So through this analysis, you realize that maybe you can’t write about yourself because it is so abstract and direct. That you need a medium through which you can expand and analyze in order to piece together vocabularies and explorations about your identity. This is the reason why your bookshelf is now dominated by books on astrology, and why you have a yearly check-up with Susi, to anticipate your year as written in the stars. It is a pseudoscience that, even though it is a cringey way for self-expression, it gives way to interpretations of yourself where you wield its own meaning. It gifts you the medium to understand yourself without feeling stripped down. The constellations cover you in protection with their own codes, twists and turns, to explain your inner self. You prefer their twinkling meanings and metaphors much more than your own.
Yet, the question remains… why do you feel so exposed when you write? Your language may be anything but cohesive, you might prefer constellations for explanations, but all the same, when it comes down to typing down the words, you stare at a naked page.
A naked, blank page.
You would rather it stay that way. Stipped to the core.
Naked in the sense that, there is nothing on it, an absence of words and meaning.
You would rather there be a naked absence than a naked vulnerability. That type of naked writing is the one you fear. The one that instead of blankness offers exposure.
Hemingway said it best: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”6
Because the real question is: Who are you bleeding for? Why are you writing this?
(for once try to answer this with no metaphors)
As an avid reader, words have always been precious to you. Books and poems inspire your soul, you want their hardcovers to devour you whole so you live in them forever. You love the metaphors and you love writing them. But when the spotlight is shined on you, when the ink wasted on pages has to include the word “I” you spiral. There you start again with the vicious cycle: “Not authentic. Cringey. Hypocritical. ”
Writing really is an intimate act.7 But for some reason you want to be on the receiving end of that intimacy, you want to read others’ words and thoughts, but giving back to the craft is hard. It might be because you connect so much to words on paper that reading your own on there seems surreal, a reach to become someone whose words truly do deserve to be read.
This seems to be the cause of your inner critic, who seems to come out roaring in writing. Because autobiographical writing involves “recreating the past in an attempt to discover and invent the self,” you are afraid of what your inner critic might find exposed in the words that pour out through self-exploration.8 This in turn causes you to become more inclined to a technique called “self-distancing” in which “one replaces the first-person pronoun I with a non-first-person pronoun, you or he/she, when talking to themselves.”9 You now realize that the only way for you to talk about yourself rationally, is to do it from a distance. That is the only way you can actually face this inner critic, and see what they have to say. The only way for you to be naked in writing is to distance yourself from it through the language itself.
Yet, in the back of your mind, you know that your inner critic is not the only thing you worry about. It is also bothered by the idea of standing naked and vulnerable to other people’s critiques, what they will interpret and analyze in your writing. Your inner critic assures you that they are probably going to agree, the writing is: Not authentic. Cringey. Hypocritical. And you worry that their reflection on that very piece of writing will basically represent you as a whole.
You look now and read back that paragraph and realize that this way of thinking is hypocritical indeed. Because, it doesn’t matter if an “I” changed into a “you” or a “she”, you are still talking about yourself at the core of this essay. The language changes nothing. All it does is sugarcoat the process to actually write it. But the vulnerability is there. You have bled through your typewriter and have found yourself completely naked in writing, blinded by a distance that you thought covered miles, but only kept you millimeters from exposure.
Conclusion
So you decided, long ago, to abandon the “I” and distance yourself from the responsibility of writing about yourself, of feeling the way you do. You accepted seeing things from afar, looking at the stars and sky for answers, scared to decipher the languages that make up your multiple identities. You realize now, that those fragments of identities are maybe just that. Fragments of a total, full piece that adds up to one person. The one writing this very essay. Writing about herself on and on for 9 pages, naked in writing, from a distance but so very close. You realize that, as scared as you are, the paper has been written, and no, it is not about someone alienated from you.
It is about me.
Because yes.
I can write about myself.
And that can sound not authentic, cringey, and hypocritical.
After all, I wrote a whole essay about not being able to do it.
But I think I can come to terms with that.
I’ll just have to click submit and see how it goes.
Archuleta, Jessica. “How Writing is an act of Vulnerability.” The Writing Cooperative, March 20, 2017. https://writingcooperative.com/on-writing-and-vulnerability-18e30b212b96.
Clements, Paul. “Astrology, modernity and the project of self-identity.” Culture and Religion 21, no. 3 (2020): 259–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2022.2093234.
Hu, Ken. “The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self.” Public Seminar, November 9, 2022. https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-dilemma-of-a-fragmented-self/.
Kehily, Mary Jane. “Self-narration, Autobiography and Identity Construction.” Gender & Education 7, no. 1 (1995). Academic Search Premier.
Pincott Jena E. “Silencing Your Inner Critic.” Psychology Today, March 4, 2019. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201903/silencing-your-inner-critic.
1. Mary Jane Kehily, “Self-narration, Autobiography and Identity Construction,” Gender & Education 7, no. 1 (1995), Academic Search Premier. (My emphasis.)
2. Ken Hu, “The Dilemma of a Fragmented Self,” Public Seminar, November 9, 2022, https://publicseminar.org/essays/the-dilemma-of-a-fragmented-self/.
3. Kehily, “Self-narration, Autobiography and Identity Construction.”
4. Paul Clements, “Astrology, modernity and the project of self-identity,” Culture and Religion 21, no. 3 (2020): 260, https://doi.org/10.1080/14755610.2022.2093234.
5. Clements, “Astrology, modernity and the project of self-identity,” 276.
6.Jessica Archuleta, “How Writing is an act of Vulnerability,” The Writing Cooperative, March 20, 2017, https://writingcooperative.com/on-writing-and-vulnerability-18e30b212b96.
7.Archuleta, “How Writing is an act of Vulnerability.”
8. Kehily, “Self-narration, Autobiography and Identity Construction.”
9.Jena E Pincott, “Silencing Your Inner Critic,” Psychology Today, March 4, 2019, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201903/silencing-your-inner-critic.