When I was born, as with most middle-class children, I was introduced to a world of stability and security. It wasn’t until nearly 20 years later that I began to suspect that world of stability and security of fraudulence. Again, it wasn’t until my first serious relationship ended, now into my 20s, that I felt the implications of said fraudulence. But get this – it was at that particular moment in time that I first experienced the tickling of freedom.
At first I thought that it was simply because I was “free” to do whatever without answering to anyone but myself (typical man-independence stuff). But, upon further investigation/introspection, I learned that this was not the case at all. I realized that it didn’t matter if it was my wife, my friends before marriage, my siblings or my parents, or my thumb and my mother’s nipples – it was all the same: stability and security through attachment and codependence, routine behavior and routine outcomes, stability through pattern and ritual, security through predictability… The outcome of which being that I had no idea who or what I really was. Of what importance is independence if there is no identity?
