You Are Not An Individual
At least not in the way that you imagine
You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile. ~Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
Individualism is a core American value. It goes hand in hand with a belief in freedom and self-reliance. One of the most desirable things that anyone can be by these standards is a self-made millionaire. It speaks to the almost religious belief that the high calling of individualism will be justly rewarded if undertaken seriously enough.
The only problem with this is that hardly anyone in America is actually an individual. Most people have not done the intentional and laborious work to separate themselves out from their cultural programming and unexamined wounds; merely unconsciously acting out scripts that have been written for them by others. You think you are an individual, in part because that is a highly prized thing to be, but almost certainly, you are not. You are more than likely a meat-puppet driven from behind the scenes by narratives that you have never even given a second thought to.
A couple of weeks ago I was talking to a man about how the social system of patriarchy (a dominance hierarchy that gives men some measure of power over women) negatively influences the institution of marriage. He felt that it was unfair to blame something as broad as a type of relationship for particular issues that might crop up for a specific couple. He told me that he, himself, did not pay much attention to what was expected of him by society. In other words, a broad sociological dynamic had no real influence on him because he was his own man — an individual.
So I asked him how many hours a week he spent actively co-creating his relationship with his wife. How much time had they spent at the beginning of their relationship and how much time did they still spend talking about the type of relationship that they wanted to have, the boundaries and parameters, what was open for discussion and what was a hard no. He admitted that they had done almost none of that. In other words, their relationship was built primarily on unexpressed expectations that stem from cultural narratives. He was not much of an individual at all. He was the product of his society and the norms that it dictates. He had simply fallen into them, in the same way that nearly everyone else around him had. He only imagined himself to be different from the crowd.
Five years ago when my husband James and I opened up our previously monogamous marriage to other lovers, we thought that we had a pretty awake and aware relationship. We had made this move to build on and further explore within the already healthy and largely egalitarian relationship that we’d had for 20 years. James and I spent a long time having multiple, in-depth discussions about how we wanted this new phase of our lives to go, and what the parameters were well before any other lover was even on the horizon. None-the-less, what we pretty quickly discovered was a morass of subconsciously held ideas about it means to be husband and wife.
After several months, I told him that I didn’t want to use those terms anymore. Initially, James was very hurt. He thought that it was a rejection of him and the life that we had built together, but this wasn’t the case at all. It was a rejection of the roles that go along with those terms and the baggage that they carry. Once during a tense discussion where old expectations were being challenged, I yelled, “You seem to have forgotten that I am not your fucking wife!” What I wanted instead, and what he actually really wanted also, was to be partners in a way that we had defined for ourselves. So we continued to work at that until it became what we truly had and we still work to maintain it.
I am employed in the personal growth industry. I’ve been a trained life coach for 15 years and I’ve been actively looking at myself and my stuff on a regular basis for longer than that. During that time I’d learned a lot about who I actually was, as distinct from who I thought I was supposed to be as dictated by upbringing, religion, and the larger culture. James has also done a significant amount of this type of work too. But none-the-less, we still were hit head-on with a large amount of unconsciously held beliefs and unrecognized conditioning that only came to light when we started to intentionally dismantle the old relationship paradigm.
Polyamory and ethical non-monogamy actively encourage transparency and in-depth communication, with a focus on being responsible for your own emotions and behaviors. But even so, not everyone takes on this level of self-excavation, and so not all polyamorous relationships are healthy or ideal. The ones I’ve seen that work well involve people who know who they actually are and have done the work to become true individuals.
You become an individual, not just in your relationships, but in everything else in your life when you question every aspect of it. Why do you do what you do? What drives your decisions and thoughts? When you jump to conclusions or otherwise make assumptions, has that come out of your own experiences or some other narrative picked up along the way? Most people’s beliefs around money are taken on from their upbringing and the money stories of those around them. But in order to truly be an individual, those all need to be consciously evaluated and current beliefs distilled out of the ones you were indoctrinated in as a child.
Except for the most egregious cases, racism, sexism, and homophobia come largely out of unconscious biases; the things that a rather conformist society operating within the rigid rankings of a dominance hierarchy has dictated as being acceptable or not acceptable based on their designated place. Because a dominance hierarchy like the patriarchal one which exists in America is pyramid-shaped, only a small number of elites can reside at the apex. Everyone else is jousting for position hoping to get to higher rungs. Wealthy White males take up most of the spots at the top, with the stratification descending until you get the bottom occupied primarily by poor women of color.
When people from the lower rungs speak too loudly or take up too much space, attempts are made to police them back into their designated place. Misogyny is a function of this as relates to gender roles but the explanation of how it works applies equally well to racism or homophobia — anything that is removed from the norm of stratified hierarchical expectations.
“Misogyny is primarily a property of social systems or environments as a whole, in which women will tend to face hostility of various kinds because they are women in a man’s world (i.e., a patriarchy), who are held to be failing to live up to patriarchal standards (i.e., tenets of patriarchal ideology that have some purchase in this environment). Because of this, misogynist hostilities will often target women quite selectively, rather than targeting women across the board. And individual agents may harbor these hostilities for numerous different reasons.
Manne, Kate. Down Girl (pp. 33–34). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Another way to truly individuate is to do healing work around your wounding. As Carl Jung famously said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” The US is a country filled with the walking wounded. Despite the slight destigmatization of getting help for mental and emotional pain in recent years, to admit vulnerability is still seen as a weakness within the dominance hierarchy. Instead, many people try to work out their pain on other people, to little success.
If you want to be an actual individual and not just a largely unconscious automaton going through the motions of a life that has been prescribed for you by other people, the society that you live in, and your wounds, you must vigorously engage with the process of individuation. It takes active and on-going effort. Get to work!
