Recovering your identity

ZenHabits has another great post. This time about recovering your stolen identity.

So, you might be thinking "I've checked my account reports and there's nothing funny going on", but that's not what the article is about. It's about finding your self identify. Now, the article kind of slants toward the 'not defining yourself by your possessions' line of thinking, which is very relevant, but it got me thinking in more broad terms.

I like fantasy books. I like reading about magic, and dragons, and epic quests, and all of those nerd things. It's not something I've really admitted out loud before. I mean, it's acceptable to be a fan of the Lord of the Rings now, but before the movies came out, that made you a geek. Anything less well-known than LOTR, well, only the basement-dwellers went there.

Fantasy is the single-wide trailer of the literary world. "Smart" people read Joyce or Nietsche (snore, by the way). The riff-raff read fantasy.

Reading the ZenHabits article got me thinking about my real self-identity. You know what? The fantasy reading, video game playing, techno-geek is who I am, and there's no reason why I should pretend to be otherwise.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's not like I've been repressing myself all these years, but there are definitely times that I sort of hide things to preserve some kind of image for myself. That's just silly. That's dishonest.

Henceforth, I will try to be more true to myself.