Rational Romantic Mystic Cynical Idealist

[kiya]

In other conversations about gender identity . . .

A day or two ago, montrealais wrote this post on the SDMB. It's worth reading. Presuming the hamsters are willing to give anyone access.

Somewhere in my head is something about mindfulness and identity. It comes out in strands of light, like a cat's cradle of meaning, and I don't know how to get it quite into words right. So I sketch, and see if it exists in the negative space.

Again I say: existence is dialogue. Before there were two things, is the phrase in some of the myths. And I said once or twice, if we were all the same, who would speak our Names?

That which is other, which is different, that brings out an ability to be aware of related things in myself. The context of the post that inspired this was a discussion about where gender identity comes from, and whether it's 'really' real, and a bunch of other stuff. And I see him saying that look, this is something that at least might lead people to think about this stuff, think about what it means.

Mindfulness. It's hard to be mindful of traits, of differences, of realities, that haven't been shown to differ. Things which are just the way things are become invisible, glossed over, they vanish. Difference -- creates the possibility of mindfulness. Mindfulness -- creates the possibility of dialogue. Dialogue -- reinforces existence.

If we were all the same, who would give us names?

Hello. I'm a writer. I'm a pagan; beyond pagan, I'm a recon; beyond recon, I'm Kemetic. I'm a woman. I'm a wife. I'm a partner. I'm in my twenties. I'm polyamorous. I'm heterosexual. I'm a one-of-each bisomethingal. I'm a submissive. I'm plural -- median, to be exact. I'm a mystic. I'm depressive. I'm a dropout. I'm a Yankee. I'm a sculptor. I'm a snarky, wiseass bitch. I'm a gamer. I'm a musician. I'm a singer. I'm a baseball fan. I'm a brewer. I'm a Discordian. I don't think in words most of the time. I hold in my mind gateways to whole universes. And many other things besides.

I am other. I am like you.

Let us be mindful together.

Comments

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Oh, very sensical, yes.

But we're all the same creature -- we're all me, heads of the same hydra.

This in particular -- Heather (um, my Heather) has said in the past that people who treat her as somehow breakable (you know, they have to treat her gently or she'll pop) when she's switched are, um, trying. It is, after all, all /her/.

(The rest-points aspect, the biochemistry not hooking up, also makes sense. Blah blah I'd go on but I don't want to ramble so I won't.)

[kiya]

It would likely be inappropriate to complain about rambling in our journal. ;)

[brooksmoses]

Ah, yes -- that was a bit of what I was trying to explain in the very long ramble above: lilairen definitely has multiple distinct rest points for her personality-state, in a way that's much less situation-linked than mine are (and that goes off to a separate thought, which I'll put in a footnote so's to avoid digressing too far [1]). And, in some cases -- say, where she's been heavily weighted towards one but is being pulled in some sense towards a different one, there's a point where her personality-state suddenly changes to something near the different state.

I somewhat conceptualize it as being like the surface of a logosplat (the sorts of logos that look like a bit of jelly went splat so there are multiple round lobes sticking out of a center but still connected to it) -- her personality-state is somewhere on that surface, and various things tend to pull it around. So, particularly in things where the pull is quite off-center, she's likely to end up in one of the lobes, and also to tend to jump from one to the other rather than moving gradually. And, extending the metaphor from a single state to a sort of cloud of many of them, it explains why some parts of the cloud are in one and some in another with few in the middle.

[1] Which raises an interesting point (and, at this point, it actually flows back into to the discussion again -- imagine that!): I've got several distinct rest-states for my personality as well, but I don't see them as multiple personalities, and I think that's because they're all driven by external things. There's a state that I'm in when talking about engineering stuff that I'm interested in, and a state where I'm snuggling with lilairen, and those are rather different -- but they're different as a direct function of what I'm doing, and there aren't bits of my "engineering" state (although there are engineering thoughts, but that's a different matter) when I'm mainly in the "snuggling" state, or vice-versa. I suspect this is explainable by postulating that my state-surface is rather more like a potato than a splat, and doesn't have notable lobes. And, so, my cloud doesn't tend to jump nearly so suddenly except when there's a sudden change in external pulls, and it doesn't tend to get separated into bits in different places.

(My guess is that this separability of personality-cloud probably has something to do with the fact that she multitasks all the time, and I am virtually always singletasking. But that doesn't really show up in the splat/potato model.)

Here, how about you go on and ramble some, so's I won't be the only one here doing it?

[mindways]

I don't have anything to add to this (interesting) conversation at the moment, except that I find the phrase "...the splat/potato model" vastly entertaining. :-)

Animal strikes again.

[kiya]

Model! Model! Splat potato! Splat potato! Aaaayayayayaya!