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Aug 19, 2019

So, one thing you'll come across a lot with long-term meditation is personality shifts, where your interface with the world changes. Mostly these are tiny shifts, the kind you see in mindfulness brochures. A bit of gentleness, a dash of courage. Some are monumental.

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The thing that happens is that the body just stops believing all the bullshit stories you tell about yourself, to yourself. "I am"-statements start sounding hypothetical at best. This opens doors you may not even have realized were closed.

Personal example: I used to have a crippling fear of social embarassment. Doing stuff in public would terrify me, especially things I was no good at. There were all kinds of autobiographical reasons for that, but fuck it, who cares? Point is, I was very scared of embarassment.

Resultantly, there were all sorts of things I'd wanted to do, that I couldn't. Too scary, too embarassing. I learned to sing, but wouldn't sing for people, especially not larger groups. Etc.

I learned all sorts of ways to overcome this fear in small ways, with great effort. None of them were reliable, and I might fold to anxiety, but at least the attempt was there.

So I had all these small stories to explain that to myself and others. "I am shy." "I get stressed in crowds." "I'm introverted." "I'm from the planet Shrktakh and the ways of humans confound me." You build a cage around your fear, then little by little you add in the bars.

Over time you tell the stories enough, and they start seeming like facts. Your personal origin myth, stenographed in the Before, recited ever since.

But when enough meditative deconditioning has occurred, everything can come apart. You remember that "I am shy," is just a story you tell. Maybe it was true when you first told it. Now, who knows?

This is when you start exploring, maybe. Certainly was for me. Turns out, there are a lot of versions of Sindre that are *not* shy. The question is almost academic. Personality is mostly "which hat are you wearing?", not "who are you?"

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12:21 PM · Aug 21, 2019Twitter Web App

But there are all these other hats you *could* be wearing. Old hats jammed into the wardrobe, collecting dust. New hats you could pick up elsewhere. All sorts of hats.

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So taking this to its logical conclusion, you can also just take the hat off when you don't need it. Wear it when you want! (Probably a good idea to wear one around people, though. Interacting without a personality is kind of rude. Mutual intelligibility is key.)

So then you don't have to go around being any one thing all the time. Sure, there are limits. Maybe you have PTSD. Maybe you're just an asshole, at a very fundamental level. Not everything is so pliable. But most of the things you think aren't, are! They are just garments.

This can't be described as anything else than calming the fuck down. Telling the story of who you are can be a full time job. But it's just a story. You can tell it for fun or for profit, but it doesn't own your life. And right now, you're having this nice coffee (or whatever).

So now I don't cringe away from public criticism unless I forget which hat to wear. There's a part of me that *really* hates it, but so many other parts that just want to have fun - and risking ridicule is sometimes part of the game.

Right. Asshole hat off. Resuming normal services.