By Evan Hale
Excerpt from "The Almost Complete Guide to Ego States, Tacit Social DNAs, and the Force That Ensures We Don't Have to—or Can't—Reinvent Ourselves Every Morning." (third edition — presumably)
Identity
Noun | /ˈaɪ.dɛn.tə.ti/
Identity as an ongoing self‑narration insisting that the person from yesterday and the person today are the same — even when the involved roles, props, and justifications have changed.
Caution: Identity often claims to be clear‑cut. That’s its right, but not a fact.
Common Confusion: Identity is often treated like an ID card: valid, verified, confirmed. In reality, it’s more like the photo on it — rarely up to date. And let's be honest: who recognizes themselves in the photo on their ID card?
Recommended Countermeasure: Cover the mirrors.*
How do we even know who we are?
Perhaps because something meets us today the same way it did yesterday — and we expect it to meet us similarly tomorrow. This quiet recognition, which requires neither proof nor justification, counts for us as evidence of identity: as the ongoing self‑narration asserting that the narrator from then is the same as the one now.
But this narrative needs support. The self can only tolerate change if it can appeal to a familiar core — even if that core is more of an idea than a condition. Uncertainty is the real threat to identity, not negativity. A familiar negative state feels safer than a positive moment made unsettling merely by being new.
Identity is our attempt to create that stability. There are two preferred methods. The first could be called "Always‑been‑this‑way." Identity declares the new situation to be the old one. After moving into a new place, it often takes only a few days before the light switch in the hallway feels "self‑evident" — and the tiny irritations that reveal how different everything actually is are quietly edited out. Continuity doesn’t arise because something is familiar, but because it is treated as such.
The second method is its counterpart: "Everything‑used‑to‑be‑different." Here, identity creates stability by emphasizing its own sense of foreignness. The new is not integrated but held at a distance. "I’m still someone from the Before," this part of the self says — not as a complaint, but as an anchor. The friction between past and present becomes proof that one is still the same person as before.
Both strategies create the same kind of imagined stability, though by opposite means. One integrates too quickly, the other too slowly, but their aim is identical: a condition one can recognize oneself in. Sometimes so much so that a recurring pain — say, the threshold you stub your toe on every morning — feels more comforting than the idea of adjusting your step. Change would be possible, but it would disrupt the self‑narration.
Identity defends itself less with truth than with repetition. It holds itself together by continuing to write itself.
If continuity is our security mechanism, then becoming is our normal state. The self shifts, often so casually that we only notice later how far the distance has grown between earlier and current versions.
Old photos make this especially clear. They don’t just capture an image; they capture a self‑narration that was valid at the moment of the shutter — a posture, an expression, an understanding of oneself. Today, the same picture may feel strange, not because we "don’t recognize ourselves," but because the story we told ourselves at that moment is no longer the one we tell now.
Becoming takes place in hiding; identity dampens the noise it creates and keeps the narration stable while its contents shift quietly. Perhaps that’s why identity can never fully see itself: it is writer and archive, observer and object at the same time.
When a thought surfaces — "Was that really me?" or "Is this really how I look?" — the process becomes clearer. Not as a break, but as a delay. A brief discrepancy between what we believed about ourselves yesterday and what we see today.
It’s not a glitch in the matrix — it’s the transition becoming visible.
Instability rarely begins when something visibly breaks. It starts much earlier — in tiny shifts that seem harmless: the coffee tastes different, though no one changed the beans. A familiar path suddenly feels wrong underfoot. A person we liked for decades feels exhausted overnight. These are moments in which the world hasn’t changed — only our relation to it has.
For identity, such deviations are risky because they create a moment where the self‑narration loses its line. Identity works only as long as present and past can be read as one story.
The break doesn’t need to be large. It appears, for example, in an impulse that no longer fits the version one called "typically me" just yesterday. These small self‑deviations unsettle identity — because they show the self has moved on without asking permission.
Psychologically speaking, this is unavoidable. Narrative identity needs consistency, but the brain continuously produces updates to keep pace with life. Instability does not threaten the person — it threatens the story. And stories that risk losing themselves fight hardest for coherence.
But perhaps identity is not a state at all, but a kind of Schrödinger interface — an API**, pretending to respond consistently as long as no one looks too closely.
What if we do?
If one could peer into this interface, one might not find "true identity," but a patchwork of modules, updates, improvised workarounds, and components long outdated but still running out of nostalgia. Versions exist in parallel without knowing each other.
Perhaps "I" is not an entry, but a bundle. And perhaps identity shows itself less in which version we are, and more in which version we are using at the moment.
Question to Go:
What if identity, as a species held captive by the past and threatened by the future by definition, comes to life only in the present moment — the now?
*Not an option for vampires, sorry folks.
**API: An interface that appears reliable until someone looks into its source code and discovers how much was improvised.
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