Identity Collage

On reinventing the self, or why personality is basically a mood board duct-taped to a cracked bathroom mirror

family portrait, 2023

I’ve never reinvented myself. Not in the dramatic, new-city-new-haircut-new-name kind of way. But I’ve had to build myself from scratch, which is its own kind of quiet chaos. My father left before I was born. My mother wasn’t interested in me—raising a child seemed more like a life checkbox than a relationship. A retirement investment. I was taken care of in the technical sense: fed, clothed, enrolled in school. But there was no real guidance, no interest, no curiosity, no shaping. If anything, I built myself in opposition to her. I patched myself together slowly, quietly. Like rearranging furniture while the house is still on fire. I’ve been collaging my identity for years—not always consciously, not always tastefully, and definitely not with archival glue.

I said in my last post that I believe everything is collage. I meant it. That includes how we form ourselves. Who we are is never just one clean stroke of self-discovery. It’s layers. Fragments. Snapshots. Bad copies of other people we once admired, now partially dissolved. Hints of childhood hang-ups. Some heavy adolescent drama, if you’re lucky. You know, the usual.

We inherit entire libraries of reference material we never asked for: accents, gestures, emotional defaults, all included free of charge. Family traditions. Regional weirdness. Subcultural survival strategies. Then we spend a lifetime editing them. Or trying to. Some things stick without us even noticing—like the way my Spanish teacher wrote her capital As. I still use it. This isn’t a new idea, but I’ve come to it not as a philosopher or psychologist, but as someone who cuts up images and reassembles them into something else. So maybe that’s what really resonated with me when watching that Arte documentary on Max Richter’s Recomposed Four Seasons.

What he did with Vivaldi, I’ve been trying to do with myself. I’ve just never called it that. He discarded 75 percent of the original. Kept only what he could live with. What still moved him. He looped and phased and added to the rest until it sounded like something new. Not an erasure. A reclamation. Something stubbornly personal born out of something universally known. That’s how I work with images. That’s how I work with memories, moods, even mannerisms.

When you borrow someone else’s trait long enough, it starts to feel like yours. You forget you once stole it. You forget who you stole it from. Is that identity theft or just growth? I’m not entirely sure. But I do know this: I’ve been editing myself for so long that I can’t not notice it anymore—in myself, and in other people too. A gesture, a turn of phrase, an oddly specific opinion that feels a little off-script—I catch those things. Especially in myself. I’ll do something and think, where did that come from? And then I realise: it’s residue. Leftover material. Bits of a former life that I never quite edited out. I think we’re all just slowly rewriting our own Four Seasons, hoping no one will notice the awkward transitions.

There are people who reinvent themselves as a lifestyle. Professionally. For me, it’s less about transformation and more about quiet reassembly. These days at least. A tweak here, a crop there. Cutting out the bits that don’t serve me anymore. Or that never did. Replacing them with something better.

The thing about collage is that you always know it’s a composition. That’s its honesty. It doesn’t pretend to be seamless. It wears its edges on the outside. So maybe the goal isn’t a coherent identity. Maybe it’s just to arrange the fragments well enough that they don’t fall apart in public. Maybe the goal is to know you made the thing yourself. Even if you had to steal half the pieces.

That feels like something I can live with.

Thanks for being here. See you again soon, I hope.

P