AliceFraser
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20% Identity
🕑 Added 2023-12-13 10:32:42 +0000 UTCNot sure where to zoom in on this train of thought, and what needs to go where for it to make sense, so I’ll just start.
Here’s some stuff I’ve been thinking about this week. Thanks to John Luke Roberts and the Tea With Alice Salon attendees this week for letting me articulate it to myself.
I’m okay, but feeling a bit jittery. Mostly focused on setting up productive workflows and life things, while knowing the baby train’s coming down the tracks and about to completely smash all my plans for an indefinite period.
It’s nice to be in a place where I can put my paintings up on the walls for a bit. Or is it? Does it just feel nice to put paintings up because I’m full of nesting hormones?
It’s so impossible to know what’s going to happen, while knowing exactly what’s going to happen. Like, in less than two months, I’ll have a baby. But how will it be?
How will I find ways to balance the new baby with existing person, Laser? With work? With fun ideas and the people I like talking to. How much physical damage will I take during birth, and what’s the recovery going to be like? Will the baby be ok? How will my hormones and my brain be treating me in two months or six? Will my personality change? How much?
Who will I be?
Like, making a baby ‘eats’ some percentage of your brain according to some science, (the number I’ve seen thrown around is about 20%) then you grow it back. (It’s not quite as simple as that; your white matter gets more dense and efficient, your grey matter shrinks and some other stuff happens, but for the purposes of what’s keeping me up at night, let’s leave it at ‘eats your brain’).
So, I think, which bit of ‘me’ will go away with that shrinking, and what me will emerge when it grows back. (Though I’m pretty sure this isn’t how it works). It’s a nervous feeling not to know who I’ll be in six months. What will inhabiting my body be like, and how functional, and how beautiful.
Who will I be to myself, and who will I be to other people after the software update?
Be The Best You, You Can Be
So, one thing I’ve been tossing around this last year is how identities ‘work’, and one way to think about two competing(?) ways to approach identity.
One is younger, more enabled and encouraged by existing online through an avatar of self. That one is the version of identity as something that you decide, format and present. You decide who you are on the inside, and then you put it out there, and the job of other people is to accept that.
The other more complicated (less fun?) version is of identity as something that’s a function of where you ‘fit’ with the community that surrounds you. Identity as a process of triangulation, necessarily negotiated and contested and contextual. Identity is at least partly who you are to other people, and that is tricky. So for example, someone could say “I’m a good friend”, but that bit of identity more up to your friends to decide, or at least weigh in on.
I think actually both of the above versions of identity are how it works, and there are different elements of our identity over which we have more or less authoritative ‘say’ but it depends on who you are as to which proportions of each feel relevant to you
I think a massive chunk of current conflicts about gender and sex identity have to do with the fact that for one group of people, gender fits into the first category (gender is a social construct, so I get to decide who I am), and for another, it fits into the second (gender is a social construct, so you are what social consensus determines you to be).
Am I what I am?
So to bring it back to me (sorry), who am i about to be? How much of that me is determined and defined by motherhood; my social role, but also by the physical process. What are the identity implications of the massive physical and hormonal changes that ‘turn you into’ a new mother when you give birth, that 20% of brain gone and replaced and then shrunk again to be regrown, now for the second time. (The same 20% or a different 20%???). I don’t know.
It feels worth thinking about, with the brains I have left.
Have some cool Gargles and Bugles and Tea With Alices coming out and the ‘Baby Bundle’ of the two solo shows: Chronos and Twist to release on Go Faster Stripe and then here for you guys. I’ve been loving the writers meetings and salons, and the work that’s emerging from there just as much as I’m enjoying my own projects (and chasing Unbound on The D’Ancey Book).
Comments
Meghan Moore
Oof. Sending encouragement. All fantastic questions. My child is 8 and I have no answers. However, I'd like to second the notion that you seem to have done a truly amazing job of remaining a whole person since having Laser!
I've always believed that we are multi-faceted (hence my IG handle is @Life_Prismatic we can be lots of things at the same time, and the situation & context brings a different facet to bear. But despite those public faces, there is an inner self that is *you*, which is influenced by, but not the complete public self. As Shrek said: "Layers, Donkey!" We have layers surrounding an inner core, all of which a relatively malleable as we develop. And how one perceives oneself is a personality thing: the black-or-white types - extreme focusers if you will - sometimes define themselves by just the one aspect (e.g. I am a Mum, or I am a Doctor, etc,) and so can lose sight of their core self.
Paul Lyon
Having children gave me clarity about who I am, at least in part. Being a dad, a papa, that aspect of who I am was clear the second I laid eyes on the first sonogram. After 4 kids and forty years, that was always clear to me. Apart from that, there has been an entire life of trying to be what I imagined other people wanted me to be, and curating my personality to match expectations. The curated me was the real me... I thought. It turns out my authentic personality was not fully formed when I took on the role of being an adult. So playing the role of an adult felt like the real me for decades. It was only when it all started to collapse that I discovered it wasn't expected, or even appropriate to try to be what other people wanted. So hello therapist. Better late than never. So finding out how to be the real me in front of other people and not have a melt down is the journey started later in life.
