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A good friend of mine is undertaking some realignment of their personal identity in a major way. It’s not my place to share the details, but it’s very brave and it got me to thinking about how the concept of “identity” is so fluid and mutable in the modern age.

Here and now, on a physical level, you can reshape yourself in almost every way except for height. Weight, skin color, eye color, hair color, and even gender–all of these things can be changed and shifted in radical ways. You can have surgery and lose 100 pounds in a month. You can alter your skin pigmentation. You can wear contacts that change your eye color. All of these things take risk to one degree or another, but they’re all signs of the same truth: That genetic heritage is no longer the solid fixture of identity it once was.

And it doesn’t end there. On the Internet, not only does no one know you’re a dog, but you can be a cat. The possibilities of virtual worlds like Second Life and even World of Warcraft enable you to completely decouple and individualize an online identity from a physical one. You can go places, say things, and interact with people in ways you only imagined or saw in movies. Your online identity is a persona completely different from yours, and should be viewed with a different set of expectations and ideas than your physical self.

Even blogs enable this to some extent. I know many bloggers who deliberately craft blog personae to draw attention and get readers. That’s not something I do personally–with me, the blogger you read is the person you get–but I can understand why it’s done. You become a new being–one that’s sustained by your page rank and site visits rather than air and blood.
I’m not saying anything terribly original here, but I just find it fascinating on so many levels, and it personally heartens me to see it reinforced–we can be more than what we are born as. You can become something utterly different and reinvent yourself. You are not locked down by the vicissitudes of fate, birth, environment, and so on.

And that’s something worth striving for.