“You are beautiful”
“You are so smart!”
“You are Jewish”
“You are MY daughter”
What if I don’t want to be those things? Do we even have a choice?
I woun’t keep you in suspense: Yes, we do.
True: at first we become alienated by that which the Others (our mother, our father, sitter, whoever takes the role of that significant Other) say we are, pointing at a seemingly unified image in the mirror, and we become that. That is a lovable image.
Or maybe not… maybe they tell us we are useless, ugly, etc. We can become alienated to that image as well. Even though it does not seem like a good thing, it still gives us a place in the world.
To make a long story short, we reside in that spot someone pointed out for us for a while. Maybe forever if we are confortable. But some of us find that there’s something odd about it, that not everything about us fits into that image we built, or was built for us.
We might have, what they call “Panick attacks”, symptoms, etc. But we know womething doesn’t add up. That’s when that, ”I know who I am” we used to fall back on, turns into, “I don”t know who I am”, and then a question.
Some people answer it through psychoanalysis, some people do it by themselves through art, or other type of acts. But we come out of that process stronger, no dounbt about that, we might not get all the answers, but we know we can’t have them all. The fiction is over and we can just be.
