What are the fundamental constructs with which you identify? Gender? Profession? Species? Interests?

How do you think of or identify yourself?

I try to identify most with just being a kind person. I think that is most important, though I dont always succeed in my actions.... If I could be anything in the world though I think I would choose kind person.

After that maybe I identify myself as a artist and as a child of the earth. Artist is pretty self explanatory. Child of the earth just means I try to treat the world around me like it is my family and try to respect all the people and plants and rocks ect I come in contact with..... (respect the earth as a whole basically) Kinda similar to being a kind person, but also incorporates how I treat the planet instead of just how I treat other people....

I think that it's less important how you identify, but rather, how you present and how other people think of you. For example: it doesn't matter if you consciously identify as 'white' or not (you may be one of those people who says "I don't see color/we're all human" ) but, unfortunately, the world at large still ascribes an identity to you, and so you're much less likely to get shot, arrested, or sent to jail than if you were a person of color.

I feel like that's a good point to make whenever we're talking about identities.

With that said, the only two identities that are super important to me are those of being genderqueer (agender, mostly) and a scientist. I acknowledge that I'm also white as milk and occupy a certain place in the class system, but those two are the only things that are really important to my self-concept.

I think of them as two sides of myself. My gender is my internal experience, and it manifests in how I dress, act, and who I associate with, while being a scientist (working on neuroscience degrees) is how I process my external experience: questioning, looking for patterns, trying to figure things out.

Blessings
~ND

I've lost myself and the notion of who I am (ego death) several times on trips. And it really makes me think about who I am, and what's really me versus the arbitrary frippery that we use to describe ourselves.

I think the way I try to identify myself is with every single category I am name, age, occupation, gender, hobbies, favorite sports team, spiritual beliefs etc. And that's what I use more or less when I am introducing myself to a person, to keep up with my persona. But as I peel back the layers of who I am, what's a meaningful definition of who I am, gets away from the arbitrary.

Gender tends to stick around, as my anatomy seems to a have say (as well as my sexual interests). My occupation is about the first to go, as I feel that my path in life is somewhat different than what I am currently doing for a living. Though really, I identify myself dependent on the present circumstance. If I'm at work, I certainly identity myself with my profession. If I'm at the beach, with a beer in hand and it's the weekend of a football game, I identify myself differently.

In the end I identify with my purpose in life, and that is to simply be a man who makes the world a slightly better place before he dies.

Thanks for the responses, very interesting to see how others view themselves in this regard.

It's something I've been considering a bit lately. Namely I've been noticing how my internal identity has shifted over the years as I've aged. Seems how I identify has a lot to do with what's going on in my life at the time. There were various times when I probably would have answered things like athlete, college student, psychonaut, DJ, lucid dreamer, etc.. Lately I've been feeling that my identity is increasingly based upon my profession, and that's kind of a new thing for me. Perhaps not directly related, but it also seems like I've been starting to be less focused on things consciousness, meditation, and psychedelics.. on being a highly spiritual being in general.

To some degree I think this is part of growing and changing. Maintaining the same identity for too long can lead to a feeling of stagnation. But also I've noticed circular patterns in my internal identities, where I cycle back to previous interests and identities over long periods of time. Interesting sometimes to be able to step back and analyze things in your life with a detached perspective, using your own consciousness to observe itself.