Drank a glass of water earlier. Knocked it out, no problem, drips and all. I'm really good at drinking a glass of water. Maybe go pro someday. As one of our national heroes would say, I could do this all day. Some people aren't great at drinking a glass of water, but imo it's not nearly as difficult as eating a piece of cake (which is no picnic). My life is all about a glass of water.
I drink it. Tell my homies after a glass and they love it. Have a habit of going on the message boards for it, talking about pitchers, filters, the comparative merits of cubes vs crushed ice, and so forth. But what really got me here, to this embeveraged position in life is making the decision to become the kind of person who drinks a glass of water. It was all in one moment, standing on my beige kitchen rug. Faucet. Sink. Glass, cubes: they made who I am, but first I had to choose to be this person. A person who drinks a glass of water.
I've got an identity! Does it mean anything?
How do you make an identity? Life which consists of hundreds of other little things bouncing around, this pulsating mess of impulses, memories and ideas, and generally a state of existence that is not really about any one thing, is gosh darned hard to identify. Most people don't have a great answer to "who are you?" Asking a person who they are, really who are they, is like trying to ask a bird to describe air. I reject the idea that identity is something you figure out, and then project outward, it's not like that, more like a negotiation, an ongoing performance, a leaking out of the truth in your head.
Identity is weird, because the implication is that is a thing by itself, that it exists, occurs somewhere, like some unseen watcher notices the qualities of your soul and invokes the naming ceremony with the phrase in mind: Water-Drinker. But there is no perfect eternal Observer, there are only the other people on this planet. They don't see your truth or your internal life, and at best with total sincerity the best you can show them is a quick glance across the surface of the Katamari cluster rolling through your being, this vast and intricate thing observed through a peephole once. For those vague and misty honesties to be mixed with happenstance and assumption and prejudice into the memory vault of the other, and then built up into a guess at what you might really be like. Identity is to allow yourself to be estimated for a chance at being known.
Identity is messy, public, and it sticks. No longer are you this floating ball of energy, here you are a shape who speaks, a function, a part within a whole. And the stickiest parts are the ones that fit cleanly into other people's expectations. You'll remember their recalling of what they remember about you, and it will become what you recall about yourself, through their eyes. And in being perceived, you are reduced. You are guessed at. Understood only in part. A person is so shrunk before they are known and then again before being made real. But that narrowed aspect which remains intact, the truly intended is built upon, and it grows.
Self-knowledge through identity is like looking at a reflection of a reflection. You can't really know what people think of you, most of the time, so you're guessing at what they're guessing about you. And so in society we climb into our homunculus mecha seats, pull on our overgarments, and we pilot around our guess-of-a-guess identified selves, walking into other guesses-of-guesses. We do not perform identity; instead others perform identity on us, while we control very little of the process. We occupy a small space within their knowing of us so that we can be imagined, invented, manifested by them.
We are more, and we are held to be less.
Emphatically, yes. You require an identity. The real world is so much larger than the physical world. The social constructs are social in origin, and they are made by design and upkeep, but still they are made. It's there, you just can't see it. And in such a world where real aspects exist in a purely social element, you also must exist in that social environment. They think of you, and the idea is populated by traits and quirks and stories that serve as handles on the otherwise nebulous depth of your reality. It is a pointer for memories, relived and remembered all at once, that blooms into their thinking of you, their share of your being here. Identity is imposed across you, for them, and is so much.
It is a thing that is imagined and then becomes real by being known, felt and eventually understood. It would be nice if that guesstimated freshly cloned copy waking up in the test chamber version of you which exists in the thoughts of strangers would also happen to match with the honest core of your being. It could be nice. Otherwise, there's always water drinking.