DisIdentification with Cheerfulness

This morning, I am feeling blah, just kind of lethargic and uninterested and mildly gloomy. As I casually worked in the kitchen, I said to myself, "I just don't feel like myself today."

Luckily, I caught myself and thought, "That doesn't make sense. You are obviously yourself right now. Say a more realistic thing." The true thing is that I usually feel cheerful and interested in many things and excited to start my day and motivated about the work I will do in it. But I also sometimes feel less cheerful, even morose. I feel a variety of things, and none of them define my identity in some fixed way. My identity (if it even makes sense to talk about it, not sure yet) is constantly in flux. Sometimes I feel one thing, sometimes another.

What I was practicing was disintentification--not defining myself by one characteristic, cheerfulness, and calling another characteristic alien. I was practicing not categorizing every experience (my own experiences!) as me or not me.

Why does it matter? I have a habit, one that is shared by many people, I think, of deciding what I am and assuming that I will always be that. I tend to imagine that there is some unchanging essence that is my core, my unchanging self. I don't actually think that belief tracks with the evidence. My personality has shifted in subtle and in obvious ways. My beliefs and values have changed. My emotions change, not just in the moment; over time, the proportions, intensity, and physical manifestations of my emotions have changed. I can't imagine what the core of me could possibly be beyond these things that obviously change.

When these changes happen, my feeling that the changes are wrong somehow, unnatural, catastrophic, that they mean a painful shift to being an entirely new person with a new identity that must be understood (because it too must be fixed) causes me a lot of pain and suffering, the suffering of not actually believing and acting on a true thing. If my identity cannot be nailed down in this fixed way, being out of sync with that truth would of course cause me distress. It's not fun when the things that happen are not in accordance with one's model of reality, especially when we don't change the model as quick as may be.

So this morning, I worked on my model. I disidentified with cheerfulness, reminded myself that I feel many things, embraced a melancholy mood as a part of myself, and looked impermanence squarely in the face. And because thinking in accordance with the actual evidence is so pleasurable, I feel a little bit more cheerful.