Who I Am
I need to write about this, as a sort of digest snapshot of my chaotic thoughts regarding my personal identity.
I am a USSR-born Russian. 22 years old as of this writing, born in 1987, I’m very much a child of the Russian nineties. I grew up on the fringe between the old, decaying Soviet culture and the emerging Russian one. It was a time of transition and disarray, openness yet instability, a time with its own ups and downs, and a colorful time of stark contrast to the dull late Soviet times, of which only very vague memories remain. A time when parents barely coped with perpetual shortage of money, and children like me were largely left to their own devices, hit unprepared by the wave of westernization. I consider myself one of the lucky onces who have not been dehumanized by that time.
My body is male, and that’s about the only thing that’s distinctly male about me. I’m tall (190 cm) and dark, no idea about the “handsome” part, especially given the glasses, and when I’m unkempt — I look funny and grotesque then. Used to be even worse before I started shaving and losing weight. I have my mother’s face, but a very different body, which I seem to have inherited from her father, my grandfather. I have black hair, brown eyes, traces of facial hair that just don’t go away, wide shoulders and long legs — the latter comes in handy for running, which I’ve always been good at.
I’m not outgoing (although I used to be in the past), barely going anywhere except home and work — I prefer online communication to real-life socializing. A cynic could say (nobody actually said that, but it’s my take on it) that I’m an insecure sissy guy with no life and a degree of unwarranted self-importance. I would very much disagree with that, and I believe I have a happy and fulfilling life as it is.
My legal name is Matvey, but I’ve always felt detached from it and its associated identity; it brings up unpleasant memories of my past, socially inept and chronically insecure self that I try to distance from. Few people call me such — mostly my family and coworkers. Even in real life I’m sometimes referred by my online handles Sikon and LucidFox, and I chose the cross-culture female name Maia, for online use and a few very close friends, because it better reflects my self-image.
In the past, I lacked a strong gender identity to begin with. Now I see myself as a girl with a clumsy, misfitting body, making equally clumsy attempts to bring it closer to my liking. I doubt I’ll qualify for a transition because I’m not in utter life-destroying agony over my “wrong” physical sex. I would very much like have a female body, preferably fully functional and authentic, but I can live without it or at least I think so. If there was a magical artifact to change my sex permanently, I would use it with no second thought and stick to my new gender role for the rest of my life, social consequences be damned. I guess this makes me mildly transgender — not that I particularly care about labels, but if I qualify for this one, I bear it with dignity and, unfortunately, a sense of superiority that I’d rather get rid of.
I’m a nice person, at least by default, and I believe myself forgiving of human weaknesses. There are, however, qualities I categorically do not tolerate: mental laziness and self-righteousness. From these stems a whole layer of behavior commonly known as “being a pillock”: bigotry, stereotyped thinking, unwarranted self-importance, stalking and harassment, etc. I try to ignore these whenever possible, but if they are attacking someone other than me… beware the nice ones.
I’m probably a hopeless idealist. I believe humans generally act in good faith, and most of the problems in society are results of misunderstandings and fear of the unknown. I eagerly see too much of myself in other people, easily forming attachments to those in whom I see desirable qualities: honesty, empathy, intelligence, level-headedness, optimism, and thinking outside the box, among others. Sometimes I get too carried away and feel ready to move mountains for someone I barely know. On the other hand, I feel detached from people whose personalities I don’t like, even if I should care about them; this includes, unfortunately enough, my parents and grandparents.
I’m interested in thought experiments and roleplaying as a form of them, as a kind of social sandboxing where situations can be explored without unpleasant consequences. I like to mentally put myself in the shoes of other people and try to discern their feelings, motivations, and thought patterns.
I’m a strong atheist: I believe that no gods exist, and I see religion as a child of magical thinking, a social construct that once made its contributions to society but now serves mostly as a nuisance, and will gradually wither away. Nor do I believe in “paranormal” phenomena, given humans’ truly unprecedented capacity for self-deception. Gender, too, I see as a kind of religion: a social construct that persists because people believe in it and are largely not ready to discard it. I believe gender roles will progressively lose relevance over time and fade into obscurity. Ideally, I would like to see a postgender future, where the strict gender binary is gone completely, and gender and biological sex are matters of choice or are even conflated into one.
As such, I accept that the universe was not tailored for life, that Earth and humans are by no means unique or special, that there is no higher meaning in life, no life after death and no ultimate destiny, and my destiny is to become a decaying corpse and cease to exist as a conscious being. I try to be a moral person because I think it’s right, not because I believe in a higher power mandating me to. In a sense, I’ve been a believer in secular humanism and independently arrived at its positions through reasoning, before I ever heard of the label.
Unfortunately, despite my claimed open-mindedness, there are a few key beliefs that I consider so integral to my identity that I defend them to my last breath, selectively seeking rational arguments in favor of it. Atheism is one of them; the other is the belief that the Maia identity is genuine, and not merely a fantasy I embraced.
Politics-wise, I’m not actually interested in real-world politics as long as the life around me stays largely the same. I vote on every election out of a sense of duty, but that’s it. In the category of abstract concepts, I don’t care much about the form of government, only about its impact on the society and its potential for abuse. I have little faith in democracy per se (primarily because the voters are largely apathetic, mentally inert masses), only as the least of all evils for large-scale communities, as much as it supports the office rotation that can in theory prevent the formation of oligarchies. In small-scale communities like most Internet ones, it creates more problems than it solves and a dose of “benevolent dictatorship” or “meritocracy” is more efficient, but obviously creates greater potential for abuse and shouldn’t be used in situations with tangible real-life impact.
That being said, I like Russia, its people and its history (although notably , and I largely support the current Russian government and believe they know where they are going, despite the occasional blatant displays of incompetence. “Fashionable” as it may be among the Russian “intellectual elite” to hate their country and their rulers, it has always been the case — sometimes warranted, sometimes not.
What I believe is my worst flaw, which I’m desperately trying to overcome, is procrastination. I’m constantly driven to go “beyond the impossible”, to complete the task at the last moment in limited time. Often I succeed, but when I do fail, I blame myself for a long time after that.
I’m a geek and proud of it, with glasses and the appropriate mindset to complement it. My interests are narrow, even by geek standards: computers, amateur photography, the Japanese language, fiction in general (as to be expected from a TV Tropes contributor) and in particular, anime and classical Russian literature. Altogether, probably not someone to expect to have a lot of common interests with, and maybe somewhat of a boring person. I’m employed as a Java programmer and contribute to open source software for fun — as a rabid Stallmanite and Ubuntu enthusiast.
I’m an infovore, always craving for new information to process — it does not have to come from the Internet, but it usually does since it’s the best source of information known to humanity. For transport, when I have no Internet access, I take books — primarily speculative fiction or computer-related ones — or print out excerpts from digital books. I do have a laptop with my OS of choice, but I never feel the need to use it.
That’s me, Maia “LucidFox”, at the time of this writing: April 7, 2009.