10:52pm June 30, 2014

general psa: it is totally ok to experiment with your identities

there is nothing wrong with going through phases while you try and figure out who you are

there is nothing wrong with being confused about who you are. at any point in your life

there is nothing wrong with saying you were x identity a year ago and today saying you are something else.

it does not mean you lied

it does not mean you were doing it to be trendy

it means you changed

thats what people do over time: they change

and that’s ok

Also it’s okay to experiment with your identity in ways that other people would find either laughable or distasteful.

When I was a teenager, like many teenagers around me, I tried on the identities of various mental illnesses I didn’t have.

I had good reasons for doing this. Really good reasons. Some were under coercion. But even when they weren’t, and even if they hadn’t been. I did nothing wrong.

Somehow, despite me being only one in large groups of kids who were doing this, I have been singled out as uniquely despicable for doing this, and people try to claim that I am lying about my identities now just because I did what teenagers the world over do, and explored different identities to see if they fit me.

I sometimes think it takes a special kind of glamour, to take an ordinary teenage experience and turn it into me being a despicable monster.

But people do it all the time.

It’s okay to wonder if an identity fits you.

It’s okay to pretend an identity fits you, and then later decide that you were after all only pretending. (Often people do this to escape something much worse. It should not be looked down upon as attention-seeking. That’s rarely the issue, and even if it were…)

Seriously I’ve wanted to do a shout-out to all the teenagers who try to find out, by immersion, if they have schizophrenia, or multiple personalities, or other conditions they may or may not actually have. Because teenagers have reasons for doing this, good reasons, and nobody ever sees the reasons as good. They just see the end result and judge the fuck out of the teens in question.

(And you will get judged harder if you’re a teen, even though adolescence is the time that developmentally it is normal to try on identities that are not yours, including very strange identities, in order to get a better grasp on who you are. This is normal and it is not wrong and it is not a mental disorder it’s just what people do when they’re confused about themselves and wondering certain things. Add in actual coercion and it happens even more, like with me.)

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