Perceive me

A guide to cutting your own bangs and having a physical form.

Being a person is so weird. Having a name and a face and a body is so weird. These things are so strange to me when I think about them for too long. The most incomprehensible part is that there are many parts of “you” over which you have no control. You can’t determine everything about how others see you, no matter how hard you try.

I have tried. A lot. People think I am very nice, others think I am funny, still others think I am very strange. A select few probably think some not-so-nice things. All of these, to an extent, are out of my control, and, to an even further extent, are true.

Trying my best not to sound nihilistic about my response but here goes:

I gave up trying, because it doesn’t matter.

I have begun to actually like myself since. It’s freeing, actually.

My thinking is this: I have absolutely no idea if my self-image is spot on with others’ image of me, or if I’m completely delusional, so I might as well think positively about the person I am. I might as well be incredibly kind to myself and celebrate everything I do.

I still struggle to do this most of the time, and I think it will be a long time before I get there. I am still trying to figure out who I am.

From someone who struggles with identity, here is how I navigate it:

I do this thing where I take a quality of myself—transient or permanent—and make it my persona for the day. Even something superficial can be my self “narrative” from time to time. As a person who constantly tries to mythologize this way, I have created a mantra of sorts to prevent me from doing so:

Something that stays the same about me is that I am constantly changing.

This is written on a card on my desk. Accepting fluidity as a constant helps a lot.

I take a lot of this to heart with my hair. I have had a variety of different haircuts—long, short, SUPER short, pink, etc—and I have found it freeing to do an entirely different approach. I just went at my head with a pair of scissors and, surprisingly, really liked the result. I did not gauge it on how much it was “me” like I usually do, I literally just cut a straight line of bangs and called that good. I have always been '“me” no matter what I’ve looked like.

The other thing that helps with identity is that no one really cares as much as you do. I find this to be particularly important in the face of depersonalization. Taking an absurdist stance of sorts lets you create any ‘self’ you want to get by.

One show that handles depersonalization and identity issues perfectly is the anime Serial Experiments Lain (1998). Its single fifteen-episode season is available on Funimation (and other places I’m not supposed to promote). It’s a bit dark but just dark enough to make the identity issues important. Titular character Lain Iwakura grapples with identity in real live versus online after getting messages from a dead classmate. For a show from the 90s, its internet epistemology is incredibly ahead of its time. Rewatching this show in 2024, I realized that the questions it poses on identity, human connection, religion, reality, and the internet are still important questions today.

If you relate to this post at all, I would highly recommend Lain. It’s also just a really enticing show.

Disconnecting has, paradoxically, helped me connect better with myself. It makes space for my alone time to be more conscious. I repeat my mantra and allow the “organic” me, whatever that is at any given moment, to exist without judgement.