I feel like I'm going crazy. I hear again and again that I need to find my own way in the world, that to live a good life is to live a life that is your own. But am I really my own person? I feel more and more that I am just a collage of aspects that I stole from other people.

I've been looking into psychology a bit, and it's very interesting. I'm very interested in Freud's ideas of the id, ego, and superego. Freud was a crackhead but he also had some good ideas believe it or not. Although I do have issues with people just taking him at his word even though some of his ideas seem to be unscientific. But whatever.

I love stages. I was really into astrology in part because it puts chapters into your life. The planets move from house to house, sign to sign, and in each stage it signifies different expressions of some area of life. Zodiacal releasing simplifies this concept — periods of your life are ruled by a certain sign, and sub-ruled by other signs. I bring this up because I have been looking into Erikson's stages of psychosocial development. I'm unsure how scientific it is, but I haven't seen people really knocking it except for being centered on Western white men, which isn't much of a problem for analyzing me. The stage I am currently in, I believe, is the conflict of identity versus role confusion. In this stage, we ask “who am I?” And I must answer that I feel like no one.

In my examination of myself, my Nekyia, I find two opposing forces: my urges and my desires. The former is the id, and the latter is the superego. I was recently diagnosed (actually if I was truly diagnosed is unclear but I'm just gonna say that I was because that's easier) with OCPD - obsessive–compulsive personality disorder. It's not the same as OCD - go read the diagnostic criteria if you're curious. I don't fit all of them, and it's unclear if I fit enough for a diagnosis. But it reflects what I think my problem is: an over-dominance of my superego and my ego's repression of unfavorable aspects of my id (my shadow). I've been consistently deferring to the moralizing agent within me, and it has prevented me from my best functioning or truly living.

So the solution should be to defer to the id more. But this presents a problem: when do I defer to the id and when do I defer to the superego?

I was told by my new psychiatrist that I may have “zealotry on matters of morality”, one of the criteria of OCPD. But what is zealotry? Caring that I do the right thing? Understanding that my actions have consequences? I view all actions as performative in the Butlerian sense, and they either reinforce or subvert systems of oppression. So if I am to act morally, I should align my actions with what should be, which leads me to defer to the superego. That might make me morally stubborn, but I think that's the right choice, given that I am open to new perspectives and constantly reevaluate myself. I think that such reevaluation is a moral imperative, perhaps the moral imperative.

But does this lead me to a life enjoyed? A life lived? When I decide what direction to live in, shouldn't I consider what I actually enjoy doing rather than what I think should be done? This is an essential conflict of the id and superego, and it is my ego that is supposed to be the arbitrator. But what else is there to base arbitration off besides morals? In this way, it seems that I should defer to the superego, inherently.

When I ask “who am I?”, I think about what I like. But in a world where every action signifies something, what one likes is a moral decision. To like to wear pants rather than a skirt is usually not a preference purely regarding comfort, but also on what these articles mean in society. By wearing pants, you perform a certain gender, and shape your identity through societal understandings and significations. By wearing pants, I become a certain type of man. If I wore a skirt, I could still be a man, but just a different type of man. My gender presentation, and thus how my gender is expressed and understood in society, would shift. This phenomenon isn't good or bad (well I might argue it's kind of stupid regarding gender), it's just reality. This is why choosing the clothes you wear can be essential in building your identity. Another example — by engaging with certain orientalist aesthetics, it is often because one wishes to align with the exotic. This makes them feel cultured, and also elevates their own image and cultural status by being the observer and critic of other cultures. But we should work to constrain these desires to align with our moral view that other people are equal. So even what I like, what is supposed to be a pure instinct, is in the realm of the superego, which I should defer to.

This reminds me of sex-negative feminists who actually truly believe that heterosexuality is inherently anti-feminist, for reasons I won't bother to go into. But if we take this as true, it presents a dilemma for straight women: do you betray your feminist ideals by engaging in sexuality, or do you repress your sexuality as is your supposed responsibility as a feminist? Because sexuality is a force beyond will, there is no aligning the two—sexuality or morality—without suppressing one. This is ultimately a conflict between the id and the superego.

Of course, as much as I hate straight people, heterosexuality isn't inherently anti-feminist. But sex still involves a betrayal, or at least a repression, of the superego, because sex is a taboo and is moralized. By engaging in animalistic sex of the id, people feel liberated. Sex is often viewed as sacred because of this shift in consciousness. (See Twilight by ContraPoints).

I haven't been able to love in quite a while. I know as soon as you read that you thought, “oh no, he's about to start going into his sex life” which, no, I will not. Give me a few more months and then I'll really start oversharing. But I think romance also involves this betrayal of the superego, because you're risking harm to yourself or others in order to appease your base instinct of love. You're risking harm to your self-image, to your emotional state, to your relationships with others. Love is brutal. The last time I allowed myself to surrender to my id, I caused damage (or at least changes) to some of my relationships that I will never be able to fully heal. It was also pretty emotionally devastating to me. God, imagine if I actually went through a break-up. I'm sorry, I can't help but feel things and annoy everyone. In that whole situation, I can't really blame anyone, which means, of course, that I blame myself. I failed, or at least caused harm, by allowing myself to surrender to the id, by not caring about consequences and just living in the moment. I don't want to do that again.

Does true fulfillment come from unfettered fulfillment of the id? Where we don't have this conflict? How does that separate us from animals? The truth is that we cannot have unfettered fulfillment. The ego, in Freud's mind, allows the id to be fulfilled through the constraints of reality and of the superego.

I can't help but wonder what kind of world we live in. There's no reason per se that we should be in a good world. We could be in a neutral world, or in a bad one. This could be heaven or hell. And I think it is true that, in the words of Sartre, we are “condemned to be free”. Am I condemned to do what is right? And what is right if not what I have been given? What I have been told is right? What is truth if not what we agree upon. Fuck this postmodern education for real because now I have no idea what to do.

At the end of it all, I think that “who am I” is a stupid question. I have base instincts from inside, I am taught cultural attitudes from outside, and I try to figure out how to synthesize these two forces to create a good life. Am I just these base instincts? Because the id is not just “what I like”, as said before. These instincts are that of belonging, of safety, of pleasure, etc. — unsignified and nondescript. “Who I am”, to others, encompasses my attitudes, my superego. In this respect, I am nothing but a collage of everyone who has impacted me. I could be the ego, the mediator, but that can't be really expressed as anything but the id or the superego.

It's kind of crazy that my therapist asked me to think on my own about who I am. What a stupid question. She might not have said that because I can't remember at this point. It's said that you change your memories every time you think about them, so that probably goes to show that I've thought about this a lot.

It seems to be up to me whether I take from the superego or the id. But currently, my ego is a slave to my superego. Is it just that I have an underdeveloped ego? What would developing it mean? Does that mean that I just make immoral, stupid decisions for the sake of it? Honestly, maybe. Seems like a bad idea though. And even still, I am making decisions in response to the superego. I really need to listen to my id, and prevent my superego from constraining it so much. But that would still entail making immoral decisions in hope of discovering some vague idea of “who I am” or fulfilling myself. It's still immoral.

But perhaps understanding the superego as a moralizing agent is wrong. Freud understands it as the internalization of cultural rules. To be free may be to shift these rules of the superego from those of one's society to those of oneself. Some day a few weeks ago I was feeling pretty crappy until, coincidentally, my friend invited me to do completely benign substances. I accepted, perhaps in poor judgment, and suggested we go sit by the lake. I felt profound freedom, smoking by the lake. Through growing up in the suburbs, I had internalized that leaving the house was not allowed. I had accepted that smoking was not allowed. And yet I did both, and I accepted that there would be no negative consequences from society. In that moment, I was free from the panopticon, and I realized that the constraints I put on myself were not mine.

The ego aims to arbitrate the id, the superego, and reality. To examine what of my superego aligns with my understanding of social realities and not that of my own beliefs may be how I free myself. To escape bad faith, in existentialist terms. I recently came up with the concept of “life-role”, which might be similar to the concept of bad faith (I don't know, I found out about “bad faith” about five minutes ago). The vast majority of us live in accordance with a certain life-role—the role we believe we need to play in order to optimally exist in society. To escape the life-role is to live in accordance with yourself, to embrace your agency as a conscious being. To escape the life-role is to engage with the id through the confines of a self-crafted superego.

Society sure has a way of latching on to you, though. What does it mean to live in accordance with yourself when you have responsibilities like homework? I guess we have to play our life-roles for a bit in order to engage in life as ourselves, isolated from the panopticon. The solution isn't to look at ourselves, but to look through ourselves, instead of through the omnipresent societal gaze.