We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I’m going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
– Stephen Fry
THE FLUIDITY OF ROLES AND IDENTITIES
One of the advantages of writing and acting is that you get to imagine yourself into a lot of different roles and identities, and that, in turn, makes it easier to see that we are not inherently any of the different roles we play in life or the labels we or others put on us.
We are far more fluid than that. We can play any number of roles and find the truth in any number of labels.
Working with therapy can do the same, whether we take the temporary role of a therapist or client.
That’s one of the reasons I love exploring subpersonalities and dreams. It’s a reminder that I can take on any role and perspective and find the limited validity in any label.
THE MORE ESSENTIAL QUESTION
All of this brings up another more essential question: If I am not inherently any role, label, or identity, what am I?
There is a sense of something more essential, a thread that continues through it all. What is that?
What I find is that my human roles and identities are useful, although they are not what I more essentially am. When I look in my first-person experience, I find I more fundamentally are something else.
I am what all of this, and the whole field of experience, happens within and as.
I am what a thought may call consciousness, and the world, to me, happens within and as the consciousness I am.
Even more fundamentally, I am capacity for all of it – consciousness, content of experience, roles and identities, taking myself as it or not, and so on.