identities

The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides.

We are all a little schizophrenic. Each of us has three different people living inside us every day__ho you were, who you are and who you will become. The road to sanity is to recognize those identities, in order to know who you are today.

If [Patricia Highsmith] saw an acquaintance walking down the sidewalk she would deliberately cross over so as to avoid them. When she came in contact with people, she realised she split herself into many different, false, identities, but, because she loathed lying and deceit, she chose to absent herself completely rather than go through such a charade. Highsmith interpreted this characteristic as an example of 'the eternal hypocrisy in me', rather her mental shape-shifting had its source in her quite extraordinary ability to empathise. Her imaginative capacity to subsume her own identity, while taking on the qualities of those around her - her negative capability, if you like - was so powerful that she said she often felt like her inner visions were far more real than the outside world. She aligned herself with the mad and the miserable, 'the insane man who feels himself one with all mankind, all life, because in losing his mind, he has lost his ego, his self-ness', yet realised that such a state inspired her fiction. Her ambition, she said, was to write about the underlying sickness of this 'daedal planet' and capture the essence of the human condition: eternal disappointment.

If you are you because you are you, and I am I because I am I, then you are you and I am I.If you are you because I am I, and I am I because you are you, then you and I are not.

The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.