Identity

It was a gorgeous spring day for my last community college visit of the semester. The atrium where the college reps tables were set up skirted a student art exposition showcasing their work for the semester – excellent, because I’d have the double bonus of increased traffic for my visit and get a more interesting focal point for my people watching. My assigned table was at the end of the atrium, directly across from the station where students of the sketch classes were doing free portraits of festival goers. It should have, by my estimation, been a very busy morning, so I wasn’t even upset that my laptop battery drained itself in the first couple of hours trying to connect to the wifi. It was here things started to go astray.

Without the distractions of paperwork, my brain focused on the (increasingly loud) conversations of the students nearest me. One in particular stuck out – a first-year, dressed in expensive designer Bohemian look clothes, who was spending more time talking about how she was being persecuted and punished for, in her words, being a “full-out 100% lesbian” (or, alternately, gushing about the attractiveness of Chris Evans. Yeah.) than she was actually sketching. We’ll refer to her as “Tortured Artist” for reasons which will soon become clear. When a same-sex couple sat down at her easel to have their portrait done together, I got to learn more about Tortured Artist’s perceived notions of herself than I’d think appropriate in an academic setting. The “persecution” part was her own words, though her examples of this persecution were among the most laughably first-world problems I’d ever personally witnessed: Her father was punishing her by not buying her the new car she wanted, but a different one instead (her presumably straight sister got to pick her own car). Tortured Artist was being persecuted for her art by her fellow students – they just didn’t understand her work (never mind that of the pieces I saw, it was truly awful). She loudly described, in vivid detail, her embarrassment the first time she took a girlfriend home to meet her parents and they didn’t embrace her choice as openly and readily as she wanted (it sounded to me like they weren’t disapproving of their daughter’s choice, but confused about the Chris Evans thing, too). The piece de resistance, however, was how at the beginning of the conversation this girl’s mother was an ally, but by the end she, too, had apparently bought her ticket on the persecution train via the inexcusable sin of purchasing Tortured Artist’s organic something or other snack from Giant Eagle, a local grocery chain, rather than from Whole Foods Market.

The bitch.

I’m not gonna lie, after the snack thing, part of me wanted to walk up to this designer-clad, self righteous, living-at-home-in-obviously-well-off circumstances, never-had-to-work-for-anything twit and shake the ever-loving bejeezus out of her. But the other part of me felt bad for her. As evidenced by the extreme gushing of her “struggles” to someone who, by the looks of her, actually went through legit struggles of her own, Tortured Artist was clearly trying to project a specific brand of identity, albeit in a very loud, obnoxious, and potentially offensive sort of way. The problem was that it was very clear she was trying to force herself into a mold of what she thought a particular identity was supposed to be, rather than taking the time to figure out what her identity was. And unfortunately, as she imposed this questionable identity as a way to presumably fit in or find her place, her classmates very noticeably took wide berths to avoid her.

A sense of identity is vital no matter what walk of life one is in or what aspirations one has. This is especially true in internet broadcasting. One’s identity helps guide the content they produce, the audience they court, and how they deal with situations as they arise. But more times than not, the persona they show to the public isn’t the whole picture. Internet personas aren’t exactly inaccurate – there’s usually at least a grain of truth involved – but they’re more caricatures of specific traits a person possesses rather than an accurate assessment of the person as a whole. This is where having a strong sense of identity becomes important. If one focuses too heavily on persona – the public surface, rather than the whole being – they miss out on important facets of who they are and remain unfulfilled.

One of my favorite hidden-in-plain-sight examples of this shows up in the movie The Incredibles, during the scene where the mother, Helen, is on the airplane headed to Syndrome’s island and discovers her children have stowed away on board. As she hands her daughter her mask, she explains that “your identity is your most valuable possession. Protect it.” This is an interesting statement because throughout the movie, we get conflicting ideas of what that “protection” means. The physical placing of the mask on her children is an important visual metaphor – Helen is literally “masking” who her children are from the rest of the world when they adopt their superhero personas. The crux of the tale, however, shows a different “protection”: Bob, the father, is miserable trying to find a place in the world because he’s not permitted to be the person he sees as his true self – the superhero Mr. Incredible. He has to hide that part of his identity. But when fate gives him a second chance to embrace that part of himself, he flounders because he is not solely Mr. Incredible; he is also Bob Parr, married father of three, responsible for his family’s safety and well being as much as he is responsible for stopping evil doers. What Bob finds when he swaps out one persona for another is that he’s still miserable; in embracing one part of himself, he ignored the other, with near-catastrophic results.

It’s easy to draw parallels between this duality with streamers and podcasters – many choose to “mask” themselves behind a broadcasting tag and a character they create. Some build thick walls between their online persona and other facets of their lives. Some put so much of themselves into their streams that, like Bob, they miss out on the other parts of themselves and burn out. In my conversations with them, I’ve found more than a few struggle with reconciling their different personas into an overall identity. It’s part of the reason I play around with so many variations of the personas at RCM – the show personas are different from the fanfic iterations, which are different from the House of Rivalcast versions of the characters. And while all show various actual facets of the people they are based on, none give a full or entirely accurate picture. Baron, Killer, Varyar, Bio, and the rest are characters based on the people who play them, but characters all the same. It’s why my podcast focuses on getting to know the people behind the personas. It’s also why The Baroness is kept as a distinctly separate persona from the work I take more seriously.

And also why Tortured Artist was having such a hard time trying to fit into the persona of persecuted misfit on the fringes of society, without realizing that persona she was taking on was a character instead of something real. Parts of that persona may very well have had an inkling of truth to the real her, but it certainly wasn’t the whole her, and forcing it created something so obviously fake that she was avoided by the very people she’d hoped to attract.

I wish I could end this by suggesting some formula for balancing the different personas one takes on, but there isn’t one. What works for one person might send another into meltdown mode (I can think of a handful of people off the top of my head who may very well have a nervous breakdown if “the internet people” ever found out their true names). The best I can do is to go back to Bob’s instructions to his son, Dash, in a track meet as Dash learns to balance his own superpowers (running insanely fast) against his “normal” persona:

“Come on, run! Pick up the pace! Move it, move it! Pace it! Slow down just a little bit! Don’t give up! Make it close!”

And really, that’s the best we can do: make it close.