Schizo

I had a strange sort of epiphany today. I decided to go public with my blog by posting it on my facebook. I also decided to finally change my profile picture to something that more closely reflects my identity (whatever that means, see my previous post "Identity"), as opposed to that picture of the Columbia Basin gorge. And I engaged in a pretty interesting blog-off with Kaseido/John.

When I first set up this blog, I didn't know what it would be about. Still don't, really. But I knew I didn't want to be constructed as female. I loved the idea of being able to be anyone or anything on the internet. But that's not what happened. My blog wandered, directionless, and my online identity floundered, essentially meaningless and context-less. I couldn't escape being me.


I attended a baby shower this afternoon. For some reason I felt very out of place and ended up going home early with a headache. I think it's because 1) I'm tired from staying up so late making my new avatar which I am SUPER proud of and 2) the friends attending the shower, who are all wonderful people, do not know all of who I am, and I feel like I have to hold back what I refer to as "my crazy."

My crazy isn't anything all that crazy, really. It's just my tendency to make very dry, deadpan remarks (only a select few can tell I'm not serious) and the non-mainstream things I choose to do with my time (like photoshopping myself into a half-elf) and this sort of awkward self-awareness and humility that I carry around with me like a bag of wrenches.*

But I feel so self conscious when other people don't seem to understand me. At work, I try to pretend to be confident, but I have a tendency to wear my heart on my sleeve, telling anyone who will listen about my shortcomings, including people who should not be made aware of my shortcomings, like my boss. So today after the bridal shower, I thought about why I felt so awkward around my own friends. And I think the reason is that I need to recognise that it's okay to "pretend" to be someone who fits in.

Even if I can't actually become a person who does the same things that everyone else does and whose primary characteristic is utmost sincerity, I can use coping techniques (like announcing that I'm joking after making a joke...) and just feel confident that if other people don't understand me, it doesn't mean I have to be different.

Normally I would say that "just feeling confident" is not one of my personality traits. But I think what I'm beginning to see is that, much like the Marille (that's my new avatar), I am actually a combination of many different identities. Gee would say I'm a member of many different Discourses. I am not Megan, who has to maneuver through the world with a bag of wrenches. I am Marille, who materializes with a different wrench depending on the Discourse I'm navagating at the moment. And the key to realise here is that Marille isn't Marille. She's me in context.

So what I did today was change my avatar to Marille on blogger, added Marille to my Gravitar, which means it will follow me around the web. I've even changed my facebook avatar to Marille. And I decided that instead of waiting for this blog to converge into a cohesive unit before sharing it, I am just going to share it and see what happens from here.

It's possible there are embarrassing things in this blog's past: shoddy writing, inane revelations, perhaps even unkind words for a few. One of the things that held me back from sharing this was the fear that it wasn't something I wanted EVERYONE I know on facebook to read. But now, given my realization (half-articulated as it is) that identity isn't static, I share this freely, because I hope that my readers can see that if I have written poorly, about inane things, or been unkind, that it doesn't make me a bad writer with poor taste who is unkind to people. Those are things that I may have done. But they aren't me. And maybe acknowledging that and showing those things I don't like about myself to other people will help me to stop doing those things in the future. That's who I am. I'm constantly leveling up. Even if it's two steps forward, one step back. I'm Marille.

*This is actually a really clever metaphor for personality traits, because you always need wrenches in like a dozen different sizes, but you mostly only use one size unless you don't get the whole big freaking tool kit, and then of course you'll need that one weird size, and actually you should probably get the metric ones too, and then you have to carry around all these wrenches, some of which work fine for certain projects, but you have to make sure you keep all of them organized, not just tossed in a bag, so you find the wrench you need right away, otherwise you end up trying a bunch of wrenches that just don't fit and you feel like you're carrying all these wrenches around and it's just frustrating. See? Clever.