I’m a chameleon. I’ll charm your parents, then make a quip about listless baby-boomers. I hate cops, but serve them lunch with a smile on my face. I engage people with third-wave feminist theory, then stay silent when folks cat-call. I slip easily into a hip-hop dialect, and drop it when I’m in someone’s office. I dress like an aloof hipster, but my lips drip venom when the conversation turns to privilege and gentrification. I hate pedantry, but write blog posts about esoteric social theory.

You may call me a hypocrite, but I say I contain multitudes. I know I know myself, and self is complex, often contradictory. My nature has allowed me to shift between various social groups.

This was starkly evident two years ago in the wake of my resignation from a corrupt political campaign. I had been working 90 hour weeks and alienated everyone with whom I had previously socialized. I was disillusioned, becoming more radical. I started hanging out with two new groups of people: politically-minded co-op kids, and bike-minded cool kids.

I became similar to both groups, which created tension. In the co-op, though I could out-talk anyone about radical theory, I was discredited because of my expensive bike and choices in clothing. With my biker friends, I kept mostly quiet about politics, but ultimately felt much more at ease.

And this is what I discovered: my relationship dynamics are governed by relative self-acceptance. Many of the co-op kids were latching onto ideology as a substitute for knowledge of self. So though I tended to agree with their ideology, I was uneasy around those who needed to constantly validate the coherence of their theories to avoid facing the void between their minds and their selves. And while the bike kids weren’t overly concerned with theories, they had some knowledge of self and could express that by engaging their passions, which for all of us included bikes.

It was seemingly obvious and ultimately naive to think I should socialize based on ideology. What I’ve found is I am most compatible with those who are honest about who they are. This can include admitting the limits of one’s knowledge, but tends to be accompanied by a thirst for always discovering more about oneself. This allows for detachment from ideas, so when a thought is contradicted it is not a threat to a whole constructed identity, but, rather, an opportunity to learn and grow.

I shall leave you with a quote from Hesse’s Demian:

“We who bore the mark, felt no anxiety about the shape the future was to take. All of these faiths and teachings seemed to us already dead and useless. The only duty and destiny we acknowledged was that each one of us should become so completely himself, so utterly faithful to the active seed which nature planted within him, that in living out its growth he could be surprised by nothing unknown to come.”