Are my thoughts my identity, or my appearance, or my street where I was born? Or my current bedtime book, hairdo or address?
In my head my identity switches from saviour of the world to melting slug. Sometimes I want to be a cat – when I was a kid I’d totally be a cat. Pick any moment and I might want to be a roller disco goddess, or a tree, or a sorceress.
Once I genuinely believed I was a sheep for three peaceful minutes – I swapped identities through the train window. *Ping* I was me again. I didn’t think ahh here I am again a cis white lapsed Catholic student menstruator – no I thought fuck my brain’s mad, where’s my sandwich… My identity was: hungry.
No – that wasn’t my identity, that was my digestive state in charge of my thinking – I didn’t identify with the world’s starving. No, my identity was: person with a sandwich.
And I can’t have been a sheep for three minutes, more like three seconds – the lengthiness was my perception. It was peaceful – time seemed slower. If anyone was watching me their perception would have been: girl. White girl with a sandwich, a train ticket and a small tartan case.
Would a woman have wondered how much she could fit in that case? Would a man have been ranking me out of ten? Would that be their identities? No. That would be my presumption. Woolly thinking.
Once I’d stopped being a sheep, did being a human feel more humany? It felt being-on-a-trainy, it felt fast, it felt packaged. If I had been leaning on a gate out there, I may have felt relaxed, bipedal. At one, at odds. I may have felt I had power over the gate lock or my direction. How much of that is humany? (Hmnn, there's a teaser.) Which of us would believe they were Observer-in-Chief? I have felt harshly judged by a sheep through a fence before.
If I was in a carriage surrounded by men would I have felt more conscious of being female? Definitely. Would I have felt more humany or less?
Is your identity what you contrast with, project, or believe in or side with? Or what someone else sees, hears or translates into their own programmed belief system? Is it our unconscious bias or our sandwich board?
Sandwiches again. I identify as a sandwich. I think I always have. I’ve always felt sandwiched. But really, am I not just a silly privileged girlie who doesn’t understand anything prattling away out of turn?
Oooh. Maybe ouch.
I definitely was a sheep though. Watching a girl on a train. I wonder what the sheep was thinking when we pinged back into being ourselves again. Maybe 'Why do I fancy a peanut butter sandwich? What the fuck is a peanut butter sandwich?'
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