picture yourself holding an empty box. this box is--in some way--representative of you. call it your identity; call it whatever you like. it is the self, an empty container, the blank canvas of you. as you move through life, you carry this box with you. you will put things in it. over time it will wear at the edges. some of the things you put inside it will find a permanent place, and other things you will carry for only a short time, discarding them when you don't need them anymore.
mostly you will fill the box with junk. static noise and the detritus of life. but also, it will hold your core values, your favourite book, your interests, your experiences, your sexuality, your cultural background, people that you know and interact with, and labels that you apply to yourself such as writer or musician or pizza lover. anything that makes up who you are, it goes in the box.
as you collect more and more things, they will all bounce around off each other and combine to make new things; they will corrupt each other; they will compliment each other. some things are swallowed up by other things and those things disappear. some things get buried so fucking deep at the bottom of the box that it gives you anxiety to think about dredging them up again. some things will seep into the very fabric of the box and change the structure of it. they will become so much a part of the box that even if you take them out, the box is already something else. it is stained, or it is made better, but the remnants of those things can never leave it because they are a part of it. and, the totality of this amalgam of random trash all mixed together is unique to you. nobody else has the exact same configuration of things thrown together. not in the same way, or in the same combinations, or in the same shapes. this beautiful mess of collected things is only you.
by default, we--as people--have a fundamental desire to fill our box. with anything. any trash that we can find we'll fucking jam it in there if it makes us feel good (and sometimes if it makes us feel bad). knowledge. identity. ideology. pop-culture. people. gods. idols. throw it in the box. make us who we are.
we are desperate to fill it, but it never fills. and, we rarely clean it. things usually just get knocked aside by other more prominent things, or overlayed, or smashed together, or broken and left to rattle around as shards.
while carrying these things around, we often like to find other people who are also carrying the same things as us. we want to be able to say "hey, me too!" when they show us the things they've collected. this helps us find commonality with others. we form a kind of communal identity that gives us a sense of belonging. we are connected by a shared part of our identity, but still, we maintain our uniqueness.
yet, sometimes in these circumstances, there is a tendency to want to create some kind of homogeneity. to curate other people's shit until the box that they carry starts to look the same as our own. the thing that we have in common: the version in your box might look a little different from the version in my box; so we say to each other "yours isn't the real thing until it looks exactly like mine". we homogenise, or we divide.
it can be tempting--when we find collections of things that have been put together by other people; religion, philosophy, ideology of any kind--to try and make our box as much like those things as possible. maybe because it's easier to fit in that way, or maybe because it's easier to copy those prefab boxes than to spend time thinking about it and figuring out an identity for ourselves. we paint our boxes in the colours of those ideologies, sometimes to the point where it's indiscernable. sometimes to the point where we might as well abandon the uniqueness of our own box and crawl into theirs; to become a part of their whole, rather than our own.
instead of treating their box like a selection of tools to choose from, to take what we need and leave the rest, to add to our own, or to use as a reflection of our own; we see their box as a container for ourselves, we step inside, and we reduce ourselves to being a tool within the thing. we become small. our identity becomes a pin on the ideology of whatever god, or idol that we have chosen to base ourselves. christians. marxists. buddhists. stirnerists. whatever. the terminology doesn't matter. it is any person whose identity has become defined by a collection of other people's ideas. no longer are they a beautiful amalgam of thoughts and ideas, but they have become a copy.
as labels these things are okay to summarise a part of the self; to point to a thing inside a box and say "that's what that is". but, for every box that you dig too deep into, you risk coming out covered thick in its mud, so much that the self becomes buried beneath it. so much that you might forget that it was once you who was holding the box--the thing that you have given up to become a part of something else.