aspiciam dominum ingrediar retroque ad infernum

I have been fed up for a while now with the glorification of Identities at the expense of the actual self within them. I understand (and was once much more sympathetic to) the urge to find a name that precisely describes your experience, but lately I'm considering that doing so may do more harm than good.

Specifically, I'm finding that even Identities rooted in objective reality still behave like Identities: like totalizing constructs that inherently circumscribe your understanding of the world. I had hoped that communities united by an actual shared material experience instead of something more nebulous would be different, but they still ultimately converge toward sameness. I've been reading disability blogs, particularly autism ones, with a more critical eye lately, and once I started seeing the shared rhetorical tics, the shared metaphors that no longer seem like metaphors but like statements in and of themselves, I couldn't unsee them. No matter how much you want Identities to be just a map, they seem, always and inevitably, to become territory. To become a way of actually shaping your experiences rather than just describing them.

I want to start tabooing identity words, at least for myself. This does not mean "stop describing my experiences", but rather "see them for what they are, without a gloss on them". Reducing them to a single label is useful conversational shorthand (it's easier to say "I'm autistic" to a stranger than to list every single autistic trait), but it's philosophically terrible. It reifies Identities as things, as conceptual widgets, rather than post-hoc descriptions of a particular type of human experience.