On Being (Oneself)

The “Real,” the lived, and the imposed upon

By Quinn McClurg

In early 2021, before I was anything I am now, I wrote a phrase in regards to my drawing style: “All I am is scratchy edges and smeared lines.” The longer I’ve lived, the more I’ve come to embody that phrase, manifest in makeup and sense of self.

Odds are you’ve seen me. No, this isn’t some self-aggrandizement or aesthetic self-promotion, but rather more about how I regularly appear. I’m “the nightmare girl,” that “punkish,” “gothish” t-girl with scary, over-the-top makeup (not that I identify with punk, goth, nor aiming to be “over-the-top”).

So why all the makeup and strappy outfits? Truth is, I’m never quite affirmed nor in my body nor “am” to begin with; I just find things that make me feel less recognizable as either male or female, human or inhuman, permanent or impermanent.

This goes a long way back, rooted deep down: I’ve always felt that I exist at the bounds of boundaries, the tearing-in-between of binaries. I don’t want to ever be / be recognized as one thing, for “that thing” is nothing more than what I am at that time.

Consider the Lacanian “Real” (bear with me): beyond the realms of the “Imaginary” (where fantasies are first granted image) and the “Symbolic” (how these fantasies may be enacted in action, art, or language) is the “Real” (the prime, underlying, and driving desire itself); the “Real” escapes actual attainment by any means, for it can never actually exist. For a gambler, this may be the elusive mystery that spends their last cent. For Freud, this may be the never-attainable desired trad-wife mommy “source” one can never return to, merge with, nor breastfeed forever upon. Recently, I have realized the “Real” to be my sense of self.

So how do you desire something that should (ideally) be innate in every human being? Whether it is actually there or not, I have always perceived sense of self as some innate thing-ness, a being-in-itself: a modest, polished stone that sits deep within, informing oneself and one’s actions. Still, I don’t have that; long ago I reached into myself and found absence—it has been the same ever since, no matter how deep I go.

Sometimes I wonder if the emptiness I have labeled “sense of self” is merely just the feeling of being; after all, the act of seeing will not reveal anything more than what is seen, and what is seen / how it is seen is far different than the biological actions of seeing itself.

Regardless, from the perspective of the “Real,” I imagine this elusive sense of self as a book: gradually written day-by-day, never quite finished nor concrete, but something you could be sympathetic to, fed enough experience, affirmation, realization, and socialization. Consider this an optimistic future-projected-self. Still, it’s almost as if I unconsciously reject this selfhood, maybe out of fears of pride, ego, or over-identification.

I do understand that I have internal unconscious consistencies and external unconscious impositions though; I constantly consciously search for them, then reject and mend them. Maybe this is the actual “real,” a lived experience of forever-oscillation, paradoxical pushing and pulling—recognizing the self-desire in the conscious and unconscious both, and actively sustaining and rejecting both simultaneously. Hell, even my body is a paradox—a woman granted the anatomy and voice of a man, as if I fail to even exist properly. This is all to say I may have made a self out of destroying a tangible sense of self; I live paradoxically because I have to to be content with living at all.

But I have limits upon my memory in the form of several traumatic brain injuries. Many of my favorite people, experiences, and philosophies have been lost indiscriminately to this annihilating and continuously lived trauma; hence why I endlessly all the same stories, just with more convolution. Odds are dissociative mental illnesses don’t help either. This is just to say there’s a strange irony in being very recognizable but rarely recognizing others; being very recognizable but never recognizing yourself.

We return to the beginning: perhaps I present myself as uncategorizable because absence is more familiar—because I am incapable of harboring “self” to begin with. But recently, I have been bolstered by the important of resistance; I desire imposing (at least) confusion upon those who impose normalization upon me—not only because assumptions based on one’s physicality should not be tolerated, but also because I am so regularly confused by the facts that I am something at all, that I am nothing, and that I will continue to be—something-ness or not.

Whatever—maybe just don’t end up like me ;).