I've been here for a few days but since I'm such a master procrastinator, I never had the time to craft a good introduction post. Tried once, a couple of days ago but my hands froze after few minutes and I entered my favourite hangout place... the writer's block.
I don't know why but describing myself is a very daunting task for me. This is the second time I've put some intense effort to describe & introduce myself.
So, Who am I?
Apparently, I don't know. I have no clue. Tried answering this on my personal blog a few weeks ago.
http://bhandariamit.com.np/aquestforselfdiscovery/
I don't think I got anywhere.
I've read many #introducemyself and #introduceyourself posts here and what I found is that the way we place ourselves in this universe and proclaim who we are, is vague, highly debatable and primitive.
- Some of us attach ourselves to the abstract symbols we were assigned to us at the time of our birth and derive our identity from our documents, origin or various tags offered to us by the society.
- Some of us derive the essence of who we are by analyzing what we do and what we have accomplished till now. We assign an identity to ourselves according to our actions, interests, profession, achievements, medals or certificates.
- Some of us define ourselves through the blurry recollection of our memories.
- Some of us like to represent ourselves with the character, principles, ideas and codes that we have programmed ourselves with.
- Some like the idea of imaginary beings like souls or spirits and some people rather prefer to tag themselves with their individual consciousness.
- Some of us even limit ourselves to the physical structure of ourselves and the projection in the mirror.
But in my point of view, these are all mere extensions of yourself. Some quite important and others quite insignificant.
Join me in a thought experiment and find out how you are defining yourself and from where you're deriving your sense of identity.
- If I ripped off your birth documents & legal papers and erased your identity from the internet, would you be still you?
- If I somehow snatched all your degrees, your skills, knowledge and your accomplishments, would you still be you?
- If by some accident, you altered or deleted your memories, would you still be you?
- If you encounter and experience a series of countless paradigm shifts, would you be still you?
- If you drugged yourself & brought down your consciousness level in a state of being half-awake and half asleep, would you be just 50% of who you are? Or would you still be the full version of yourself?
- If I altered your face through plastic surgery and exchanged most of your major organs and parts (except brain)... would you be still you?
One can get a clear & concise idea from where they draw their identity by answering these questions.
But the thing about one's true identity is that it's not a fixed & enclosed set of information that we limit ourselves to. Plus it's riddled with lots of philosophical dilemmas and unanswerable questions.
For example, If I describe myself here by selecting few of the above-mentioned parameters and create a self-image, that's my identity according to myself.
But what about the identity others create about yourself? Does their thoughts and perspective matter?
Or your self-created identity is the only one that counts?
And maybe when you're assigning yourself an identity, you're missing a lot of key information about yourself which shapes your personality. Maybe your parents, siblings or friends know more about you than yourself in some of the aspects?
In that case, the identity created by your near ones may be more accurate and you may be living your daily life without fully knowing who you are!
Think about this... A part of you is just trashed into some corner of your unconscious mind which you have no idea about, and it doesn't even make a difference in your regular life. Or maybe it can drastically change your life if only you would find your true self. I've met a lot of people suffering from inferiority complex and they often undermine their abilities and their true inner potential... and it decelerates them from moving forward because they're always embracing self-doubts and insecurity.
There's not a single authentic guidebook here on this planet which instructs us how to derive our identity. Maybe nobody knows who they are?
When asked to introduce ourselves, We desperately try and put ourselves in a little circle, allocate different views and opinions & create a self-image of ourselves; And the perspective that we have about ourselves establishes who we are in our minds and creates an identity.
But the circle, in which we put ourselves and stuff ideas about who we are, isn't rigid or permanent.
It's volatile. And the self-image created by you, which you are currently clinging to, is so changeable.
It might even change over a small tweet or a blog post like this.
It might change over a short SMS or an insightful video.
It might change over a message in a beggar's cardboard or an advertisement billboard.
You might even completely rewrite your identity over a small coffee conversation, a piece of serene music, an aesthetically pleasing art display or anything that you see & observe in your daily life.
There are just countless possibilities because the nature of the thought generation algorithms of our brains is chaotic and unpredictable. I would bet all my money on the behaviour of bizarre quantum particles than putting my chips in the nature of our thoughts.
And It's pretty useless to attribute ourselves to a certain set of information if you ask me.
Almost like writing with an ink pen on a running stream of water.
Why so?
Because neither your body nor your mind stays the same with each following second. You might have heard that within a span of 365 days, 98% the atoms in your body are already replaced with the other identical ones. And within a span of seven years, you will have completely replaced every particle in your body. So I ask you again... Fast forward yourself to seven years from this moment in time and ask, Am I still ME?
I love the whirlpool-metaphor of the great philosopher Alan Watts. It's like we are all just different whirlpools in a large river of spacetime, occupying small spots in different areas.
We all have a seemingly definite outer shape and appearance and although you'll identify a whirlpool being the same whirlpool 10 seconds forwards or ten seconds backwards in the time from the present moment, the water in the whirlpool never stays the same. On the molecular level, the constituents of the whirlpool are changing every nanosecond.
The whole point of this long rant is to say that the introduction I give you here right now stays in the blockchain for eternity, but it might be completely irrelevant just a few days later.
Maybe I'm just overthinking and taking a friendly introduction post too far and maybe I'm just too serious about this.
Or maybe and just maybe we should all keep aside a few minutes every day from our hectic schedule of our daily life, and contemplate about who we are and what's our place in the universe every now and then.
Because to find yourself ...
Is to unravel one of the biggest mysteries of the universe.
Just in case if you think I'm doing injustice with the topic 'Introduce Yourself', here's what my whirlpool currently constitutes of :
Hello, I'm a creatovert with an unhealthy addiction towards information.
I love to gobble up everything this universe has to offer.
I'm not an expert on anything but my friends consider me a live Google & Wikipedia bot.
My interests shifts from one subject to the other every week and currently, I'm trying to develop e-commerce sites for my clients from scratch with zero coding skills on my account and I'm also participating in various ICO events recently and learning about cryptocurrency.
I'm also learning a little about Digital marketing, Design Thinking and Autocad from various online resources every day.
I love researching for loopholes and hunting for opportunities.
I hate being told what to do and what not by self-proclaimed life experts so, I lead a pretty reckless life.
I'm also a chef... I cook up interesting stories and thought-provoking articles like this one:
http://bhandariamit.com.np/symphonyofinspiration/
I'm a mechanic too, I fix broken hearts and damaged spirits.
I like to call myself a contrarian thinker and an analyst; A psychological warrior set out to eradicate outdated thinking patterns.
I love listening to music with pumping beats. ( Join the #jukebox chatroom in PALnet channel in Discord and you'll always find me there)
I play football with my friends a few games every week and I also love sketching cartoonized portraits like this one in my free time :
(
She's a foreign friend of mine.
I love connecting with people who are passionate about their life. You'll find me on most of the platforms by the username @creatovert !
See you again in next blog post. Keep steeming 😃
Ah! yes... I nearly forgot!
!(
That's me by the way.