Someone asked today what a 'sense of self' is.
I want to tie this into ideas of relationality. I am a distinct individual, let's start with that. I'm not disavowing that entirely.
But I am also ‘an unschooler’: but this is not an attribute of my education for comparison. It is a community, a network of relationships with people working in similar ways. It's connections to anabaptist traditions and to a mode of interacting with parents (both in concept and my actual parents)
I'm from Colorado. But it's not just a place on the map: it's my relationship to my sense of smell, and my tolerance for cold weather and bright lights. It's a love of dark skies and clear views of the milky way. It's a relationship to knowing I am very very small in a vast universe. This is not a universal explanation of from-Colorado-ness, but it's mine.
I'm transgender, but that's not just I-myself-was-born-in-a-wrong-body, but I have a community and network and sense of belonging outside of myself. I've got embodied knowledge of being a dozen ways that others don't get to experience. It affects and informs my relationship to my communities and my work.
I’m argumentative and sometimes a little arrogant, but this is also because of how I'm connected: there are things I know deep in my body that I cannot explain how I know, but I do. I forget that others see me as a ‘you' and not a 'we' sometimes, and so misunderstandings happen. But to change that would change me in ways I'm not quite willing to grow into, so there is going to be a small callus in how I socialize. And it's fine. It works. I am who I am, but I also don't think about _me_ that much. To think about me is to think of all the connections instead. They're inseparable.
@jimcarroll@futurist.info
