On Alter Egos

At the risk of sounding like a sophomore philosophy major, are you ever truly ever are "yourself? Don't we all wear all sorts of masks to navigate the world? Don't we all have these different personas to interact with different-different people?

The truth is, whether you're conscious about it or not, everybody veils their true selves behind placid Stepford façades of these alter egos to get through the party of life.

Think of it this way you have an ego, and what the job of your ego is, its to protect you.

When you got scolded by your mom for using profanity in the house, you sort of stopped using that old german word that was sort of slang for copulation. When you were once betrayed by your best friend in second grade you learned that if you open up to people, there is a possibility that they might betray and you stopped truly opening up to anybody.
When your dad expected you to be a baseball player when you were just three and put you in the little league, and you were the guy who couldn't shoot that ball even if your life depended on it, but you still do your darnest.

What happens is that you fail, and fail, and fail even more. And when you fail you think that's you but what's happening on a deeper level is you're building "THE WALL" brick by brick, building this persona, or this mask to protect yourself.

You start to learn very quickly what the world expects from you and forget really quickly what you expect from yourself because... there's really no place for that. You quickly start iterating and testing through these mini versions of yourself to see which ones will survive, and which ones have no hope of surviving the long-term, analyzing from the feedback that you get from the "system" early on. (well that's Freud for you in a nutshell)

And when you grow up you think that you have come to the realization that you came to all these "rational conclusions" after engaging in some intense rational socratic dialogues & examination in your life but it really isn't so...

Remember the times when someone attacked you and said that you were talking exactly like your mom and dad and you were so pissed mostly because deep inside you knew how true it was.

And what you will realize when you finally take a 30-minute pre-deathbed pause to look down at who you've become and do some "self-examination" (the one examination you never really bothered to appear for) is that a lot of what you "believe in" and things you've thought about and "reasoned out" is that you haven't ever really thought about it all.

Now enough generalized psychological banter. Let's use an interesting real-life case study to dive in further: me.

If you're prolly reading this, there's a 90% chance that you know me as "Kay". Now a lot of people don't know but my real is- Tanmay Kumar. And well as you're pronouncing that name right now in your head, there's a 90% chance (a painful statistic that even surprised me) that you're pronouncing it wrong (that is the case if you're one of those people from halfway across the world that work with me).

And because [long pause and sigh to indicate what I am about to say does not make me happy] I hate it, I despise it, I abhor it, when I have to correct people when they mispronounce my name, so to prevent it being mispronounced even more times that I myself might become not totally sure if I've been saying it correctly, I just decided to shorten it to Tkay (my initials, aka TK) and then I decided to drop out the "T" just leaving a surely-now-you-couldn't-go-wrong one-syllable name: Kay pronounced as "K".

Now by the geniousness of the trick, you might have guessed the age I did it too was quite young, basically around the time in HS when I had started doing some profesh gigs and stuff.

The people who knew me as "Tanmay" (most teachers, friends, family and peeps from my HS), never knew about "Kay" (here's why), and the people who knew me as "Kay" (aka most the people I worked with) didn't know me as "Tanmay" and very few close friends and co-workers kinda knew about both sides of me.

But the fascinating thing is that they didn't just remain some two-three syllable names one has. They slowly started to become two entirely different personas, evolving into two different domains. It was almost as if I was living these dual lives in a way.

If I had to psychoanalyze this... I guess it was prolly because well... I had realized early on that the path that I wanted to take wasn't necessarily what my parents would've wanted for me and by doing this I had somehow developed the capacity to be the son at home who pretended to be that which my parents, teachers, or even society expected from him and then there was the other me outside of it, who did what he really wanted to do.

So living in dual realities/alter-egos in a way, the faithful one and the authentic one, the traditional one and the creative one. It was just something that I picked up really early on. And since then, even though I didn't actively need it... but these two sides have still remained, evolving and taking on different roles. And the irony is that how goddam different they are.

It's like one was a bubbling creative freak, always cracking jokes and with sort of an extroverted "just do" attitude.

And the other was sweet but shy, introverted, super-logical and over-planning about things guy. A bit like the hands-in-his-pocket quiet conserved walking on the beach on a cloudy day guy.

It was like one was the thick skin that you get from going through the symbolic darkness and the other was the manifestation of the true self that I had created.

It was like one was the writer, the other, the editor. One being the designer, the other, the developer.

Which was which... you can prolly quite tell that...

Now lets further dive in with a further prolly useless and time-wasting thought experiment, and ask:

Was it Tanmay that invented Kay or was Kay there all along?

Which was the alter ego and which was the true self, the real one (if such a thing does even exist)?

It's a fascinating question innit...

It’s like asking, in batman who is the alter ego… Bruce Wayne or Batman…

It’s like asking, in superman who is the alter ego… Clark Kent or Superman…

And at first, I thought obviously the alter ego is, superman...

My alter ego is Kay, an alter ego which Tanmay created to do things he was not able to do, to express the part which was suppressed in him… Kay was Tanmays fantasy played out… Kay was the idea… the ideal... the powerful creative side of me…

But the more I thought, the more I began to wonder: What if I was Kay all along? And I had just created Tanmay to go unnoticed through the day-to-day and blend in.

It’s how like we are all in a way just like Clark Kent, doing everything to keep ourselves safe by playing at a level lower than what we’re capable of. It’s our way to making us safe in our environment but at the core, we’re all superman.. we all have these amazing powers that more often than not, we don’t even know of…

Maybe I had just spent so much time being Tanmay that I forgot that I was Kay. I forgot about this side of me.

Maybe we create this Clark Kent at certain points in our lives because it is going to ensure that we don't get picked on... but sometimes it was useful in keeping you within society's norms.

But I don't like to think of them in terms of one being stronger and the other being weaker, or one being more preferred or the other not...

Because it's really not that way.

I think I am making it a tad bit dramatized, more than it actually is. It's more like they are both two sides of the same coin. As ChatGPT (my new AI therapist) gracefully sums it up:

I mean it's just fascinating to see how we, as humans, have this intrinsic need to play roles. But it's more about not letting these roles play us but more so about starting to actually decide what roles we want to play and consciously becoming aware of them.

When used correctly, alter egos can give you the freedom to unlock this creative force and a playful way to overcome fear, to step into these roles to navigate certain situations that you normally couldn't.

And at the end of the day, we all contain fantasies that want to become conscious. And the goal of individualization is to become who we really are. Part of this process is making conscious of the dichotomies in one’s personality which often involves making conscious of one's anima and the animus in order to differentiate him or herself from it, and not be dominated by it. And eventually integrating the yin and the yang.

( Oh man what the hell am I writing… like seriously! where is this shit coming from… am I still hung over the heavy flu medication I was on…? Okay I think I really need to stop with my fetish of Freud’s books)

You get what I'm trying to say here right... that it's three in the night and I should prolly go to bed and stop reading so much Freud and Jung just after binging Moon knight. And stop dramatising everything so so much... I mean they are just two silly names after all...

Oh you’re definitely gonna think I’m weird after reading this… maybe even weirder than I actually am…

Lol, I should prolly stop rambling on and on now and go to sleep.

Fin.