*What Do You Identify With Most?*

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What aspect of your life do you most identify with?

What area of your life represents "you" most. In what area/aspect of life are you most invested?

Which aspect of life do you ( most ) "have to" control in order to feel "safe" and/or "successful"?

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For the last 16 and a half years I identified most of all with my body.

I identified myself with my family as a child; with my sex, ( female ), for a couple of years in my mid-to-late twenties; always to some extent, ( the extent varying through life ), with my possessions and home; with my ideas and beliefs at points too, but for most of the last 16 years I identified myself "heart and soul" with my body.

But the times they are a changing! And it feels really weird!

Who else has experienced an important shift in what they identify with? And if you identified very strongly/passionately with one thing in particular, only to have the scales fall from your eyes, what effect did that have on later identification of yourself with things/aspects of life?
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Last edited by ouinon on 27 Apr 2009, 5:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

For the past couple of years I have been feeding a flock of about wild ducks to help them through the winter which, in Helsinki, can be severe at times. I also sneak peanuts to wild pigeons when people aren't watching. People, in general, hate any life other than human or their pet dogs and cats. I suppose I identify with ducks, although I rather admire seagulls.

That's interesting; I realised after it was too late to change the poll that I forgot to include options for identification with a person/persons, but I didn't think of animals.

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The most? I'm not sure if there's anything I can identify myself with, but I guess my ideas and agendas are closest. If they change so do I, or rather if I change, so do them.

Can't it be more than one?

I'd say the first one and the second one on the list....mostly. I tend to internalize and focus too much on myself and worry about how I look or appear. I'm also very attached to my possessions and go crazy if I'm forced to leave them behind. I can get very possesive and obsessive with both of these components which gives me meaning in life.......not that I'm vain or anything.....

As someone who has lived a rather peripatetic life I have more or less gotten used to the concept that my possessions come and go and possession is a rather temporary affair. As an artist I have created many graphics and sculptures that I felt had some value. The overwhelming bulk of them have disappeared into the chaotic past and my computer gives me some comfort since I have photographic records of most of them stored on discs or in hard drives. The graphics can be reproduced to some degree on a printer but the three dimensional stuff remains merely in my dreams. Three dimensional printers may eventually remedy even that but we still live in a somewhat primitive world.

Yes I'm slowly but surely having to get use to leaving things behind even though it's still hard.

Went homeless for about 2 years and it was so hard having to leave some of my childhood obsessions.

One thing I've learned from this experience, don't hoard things. I don't collect things like antiquities, coins, books, and paintings like I use to.....which is hard....

I think you left out an option, especially considering this is an AS forum. "Hobbies and interests".

But hobbies and interests could mean objects/collections, a person/persons ( characters in TV shows, etc ), ideas and beliefs, ( history, science, philosophy, etc to AS and other labels/social constructs, etc ), the body, ( as in fitness, food etc ), work and/or workplace/studio, ( as in art, craftwork, etc ), etc etc etc.

Hobby/interest could mean anything, and what I am interested in finding out is what thing(s). What things/aspects of life do people identify with, experience themselves "through"?

PS. I know I left out "person/persons", as I said above, and also "animals" as Sand's post showed. Sorry about that.

And if your interests really don't fall into any of the categories you can vote "Other" and expand in thread.
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Last edited by ouinon on 27 Apr 2009, 2:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.

How long have you identified with animals? All your life or since a certain age? Do you know what prompted the identification?

It's interesting because I am realising that my own intense identification with the body meant that I experienced life from the viewpoint of my body, suffering from the "abuse" I dealt it, ( alcohol and fast food in the distant past, intestinal inflammation from gluten, the artificial "highs" followed by exhaustion from sugar, etc ), and that this coloured my whole life for years. I saw/felt "life" as if I was my body.

And your saying that you identify with ducks/animals fits that model of identification in that your posts frequently express pain and anger and distress about the way humans behave exactly as if you were seeing them from another/wild animal's perspective.

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I identify myself to who i am o.O I'm a bit of everything and nothing at the same time ~­.~ And Sand, i think i somewhat feel what you mean, because there are objects i feel "attached" to, even if they don't have much value, they hold a lot of sentimental value to me and i'd rather keep them than see them trashed. ._. (people nowadays are way too quick to send stuff to the trash anyways <.< )

Yes, that's fine. I just didn't want to load the poll with too many combinations, so thank you for "expanding in thread".

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I have associated with all sorts of animals all my life. As a kid in Brooklyn I was fascinated with the seagulls where, back in the 1930s, Shore Road had no highway along the Narrows and there was a huge stone edge where the land met the water and I would lie on my back and watch them hover. But I have lived all my life with many different and different kinds of animals and loved them all. As an AS I always communicated with them much better than with people and still do. How wonderful to be a bird and leap into the air and not be afraid of heights. I have always (and still do) dream of flying and the thought that I could move freely into any landscape hundreds of miles in any direction and feel at home in the entire Earth is the way I would love to live.

^ It would certainly be an awesome feeling, especially when you see bird's eye view pictures of our magnificent planet...

Do you mean that there is nothing to which you are particularly attached, nothing which you would miss especially except in so far as it would throw out the perfect balance of "everything", nothing which has to be under your control more than anything else?

Not even your body?

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