domingo, 19 de febrero de 2012

A Shared Neurosis for Control

The british pop rock band Blur wrote a song once called " Boys and Girls " it does not take one very long to actually grasp what they were talking about, namely modern life and the crude paradoxes of interpersonal relationships.

Before dwelling further into human relationships, it is worth looking at Identity as a concept... if there is any. Some believe that what makes us who we are its nothing but a multifactorial mixture of events such as whether you were raised a christian, come from a traditional family or were breast fed by an unhappy mother.

I personally believe that Identity its no real entity in itself, rather than an entity or this "fixed notion" that most of us make of ourselves to navigate the world in the comfort of "safe expectations" I find it to be a process, in which we constantly shift from one role to another according to the situation or life context we encounter ourselves in. Finally, there will be more dominant roles than others, and perhaps this combined with an essence of individuality whether its DNA or to put it more romantically, a soul , creates the final Identity.

So it basically goes like this... once you know who you are then you are able to know what you want But do we ever really get to know ourselves? is there time enough in life for doing that? I guess not. However, hope still floats and swims its way back to the shore like a skillful surviving rat from a ship wreck.

We fall in and out of love, jump from first person to third person in the blink of an eye, go from infatuation to hatred as traffic lights turn green to red with such immediacy that i find it sickening. The key word here is Choice... so many choices, so many roles to perform, so many ways to go so which one is best ? which one will set us free? which one will allow us to be truly ourselves yet blend our singularity with someone else´s ?

Welcome to the era of the Playing Self, we desire to find ourselves and ultimately be "unchained" yet the paradox lies in the fact that in our desperate quest for meaning and relatedness we actually risk losing ourselves, because the ways in which we shape ourselves are already canonically given within the system. The words which we define our needs conceal a void,  even as these definitions invade public and private discourse. Behind them lies a multiplicity of meanings which expresses the ambivalence of the nature and the society that constitutes us.

Are we still able to identify our real needs? probably not univocally. They have become a part of a symbolic field charged with tensions: an arena where the feelings of lack, absence and weakness which continue to fuel our search for answers clashes with the power we have acquired over ourselves and over our environment.


Most of us have projects in life, dreams, ambitions and things we want to achieve for ourselves. We face more or less similar challenges in a globalized world and the list just keeps on getting more homogeneous as we appear to be heading towards a more cosmopolitan sense of being.


Idealization is infatuation´s accomplish, and infatuation isn´t love. It bursts like an Alka Seltzer pill on the surface and then it sinks down in the bottom of the glass. Ladies, there is NO KNIGHT IN SHINY ARMOUR , take the person and what is happening between you in their whole singularity not your own idea on how things should be.

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