I guess we (or rather, I) have to start with ourselves (myself 🤣).
The one thing we know for sure - “I exist”
That’s how Descartes started anyway 🤷♀️
But identity as a concept is tricky -
Situated as we are in an ever-so-connected society, we can often feel like a confluence of forces and flows.
Like we are being swirled around by circumstance, at best limited to choosing between established patterns in the most minute aspects of our lives.
Just the usage of the word ‘I’ to invoke a primitive, basic concept can be a gross misrepresentation of reality.
Many folks we know do indeed feel this way.
In our discussions on this, we found a version of this idea that seemed to be more basic, more visceral - boundaries.
“I perceive the boundary that marks the end of me”
A boundary can be understood as differentiating a thing from everything else:
It can also be imagined as the space between subject and object - Being a subject means viewing from the inside, whereas perceiving something as an object (objectively) necessarily means viewing it from the outside.
Boundaries allow for two things:
We like to call these impressions & **expressions (**or interactions, when taken together)
Notice how they’re both inside the boundary - we can’t know what happens outside, by definition 😁
Bearing this in mind in every conversation (and believe us, it’s very very hard) is the first step to communicating/sharing well.