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i don't have a full thought here but i'm thinking about the particular subculture that describes themselves in what you might call "carrd form", which is a list of such things as
- triggers
- mental illnesses
- characters they kin
and it was that last one in particular that made a thread start to form in my head, because i've only ever seen this as a list of characters โ not a paragraph about what they mean personally or why they are such a strong fixture of identification, just "i kin them", where even the word "kin" seems to mean something different to everyone who uses it. i'm ancient enough to remember when it meant people who believe they have the literal soul of a dragon or fae or similar creature, believe in the sort of way that waves off the many questions that raises as not being relevant to the core idea, which is confusing to me but perhaps reflects a clarity of intention i can respect; on the other hand i don't think too many people are asserting they have the literal soul of elsa frozen, but they certainly intend to convey something, and exactly what that is seems to elude me
so what we have on its face is a list of consumptions, a set of well-known figures from well-known intellectual property franchises, silhouettes of personalities that were designed to be likeable and relatable and whose brands have been fully bought into
but it tells me just as much as telling me you're bipolar or can't handle photos of eye contact; it's a vague blob on the periphery, a category you fit into that might as well be the size of a horoscope. (is this a warning or a proud declaration? both are offered up with the emotional weight of a bullet point)
maybe that's the thing though; maybe it's not a new hyper-consumerist tendency to want to reduce ourselves to a short list of adjectives, maybe it's just the universal desire to be part of something, to find a group small enough that it's meaningful but large enough that we might encounter someone else in it, whether that group is capricorns or INFJs or seasonal depression or jimmy neutron kins. imagine if everyone who's into horoscopes and star signs found out that they were all allowed to make up their own star signs, that it is in fact all made up, that it is the ghosts of the long dead looking up at an arbitrary assortment of twinkling dots and passing the time by trying to find ones that roughly trace out something like a crab, and that you're also allowed to do that for any creature you like and it's no more right or wrong, only less familiar. maybe this is just deviantart likes/dislikes on your ref sheet but as passed through the strange mid-10s tumblr cultural lens where everything was judged on its validity and so you couldn't just have a personality, you had to have a named Thing and argue for its legitimacy so that your peers would not only respect it but consider it a form of bigotry for others to not like you
but maybe also we would know ourselves better if we worried less about external reference points and more about internal landmarks; if we described ourselves less as three adjectives meant to hint at the shape of our inner world and more in terms of the impact we have and aspire to have on the outer one
maybe we should see ourselves as ongoing stories, not a set of ad targeting keywords
and i don't know i'm not trying to pick on anyone here, just trying to get a feel for the shape of the world, because i've had so many moments where i've seen someone describe themselves in a way that seems incredibly specific but which feels like it tells me nothing about them, and each of these moments is its own twinkling dot in the vast expanse of the human experience and i too am just trying to find a crab
