Mi'sen

The 2020 option is what most people who strongly identify with a label were doing before they had that label. It's painful and exhausting unless you can easily pass off what you were going to do anyway as acceptable to the mainstream.

If you let other people label you then the labels you end up with are rarely nice ones.

what about 'artist'?

People generally don't apply the word "artist" to you until long after you've succeeded, and many artists feel the need to claim the label for themself long before anyone will give it to them.

right. maybe you can pick the label for defensive legibility reason. i meant to say believing it and acting from it first is misguided

Yeah but https://twitter.com/DRMacIver/status/1213829496127795200 … It's not necessarily that people believe it, it's that the way the social feedback loops work reward you for complying with your label and punish you for deviating from it, but the default label is "normal person" so you're shafted either way.

The strength of psycho-social feedback loops is pretty amazing, but you can undermine a significant amount of the conditioned responsiveness to the category mechanism, such that it has much less impact on you. There are risks though, such as careening into perceived social death.

This is one reason why meditator types who try to go it alone have a much lower survival rate - you need other people who have gone through the process of disentangling from cultural contexts to support you, and make the space between worlds seem safe & sane.