The Poison of Identity

Why Identity Is Absurd

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Photo by Iulia Mihailov on Unsplash

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Well I’m back on Prozac. Day five today. After 6-7 weeks off. Ugh. Never again. What was I thinking?, you ask. That’s just it: I wasn’t thinking. I was feeling. And feelings are one of those “cognitive distortions” CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) talks about—I think very truthfully and accurately—wherein you get screwed if you live your life according to how you feel versus how you think.

Now, don’t get me wrong: There is a place for emotion, of course. Avoiding feelings, shoving feelings under the rug, denying feelings, pretending feelings aren’t occurring, telling yourself a story that you don’t have certain feelings: None of these are helpful. Instead, you need to fully accept, look at, and take on your feelings.

But. There’s a massive chasm between acknowledging your feelings and allowing yourself to feel things, versus living your life according to how you feel. The former statement is good, the latter statement is not good.

The problem with living your life according to your emotions is that emotions are 1. Wildly variable; and 2. Often not based on anything connected to real life or lived experience but are simply…feelings. Regarding point 1, if every time you felt angry or rageful, sad or depressed, positive or negative, offended or insecure you felt the need to sit someone down and explain in detail how you felt and why, or if you felt the need to do this yourself within your own inner landscape…your life would be absolutely exhausting.

Regarding point 2, we feel emotions all day every day for all kinds of reasons or non-reasons, probably dozens, even hundreds of times per 24-hour cycle. A memory, for example, can rise up from seemingly out of the blue and inspire deep, rich nostalgia, or pure joy or rancid anger or pitiable shame or guilt, etc. Someone might cut you off on the freeway and you might feel a rage so animalistic that you genuinely fear your reaction. It’s sort of taboo to discuss this in our false “positivity” craze in contemporary times, but most people seem to have all kinds of thoughts—from totally inane, obscure and mellow to absolutely clinically insane and murderous—on any given day. How do you feel when someone cuts you off in traffic? What about when your kids are in the car? How about when you get on the subway in NYC or Boston or Philly and some homeless, mentally unstable guy gets on the train and starts threatening people? Don’t worry: Your “taboo” thoughts here are in fact totally normal.