Pull Your Selves Together: Fluid Identity and Authenticity

The exhortation "Pull yourself together!" was a staple of my education at boarding school in the U.K. It could be heard slung at a school child suffering from academic anxiety, at another who was interacting from emotion without the required "stiffness of upper lip", or even at those (like me) with slightly hypochondriac school-skipping tendencies.  In later life, I've often thought about what it feels like to respond to such a command or self-expectation, always concluding that, far from being in any way healing or constructive, pulling myself together generally feels like pulling myself apart!  One could argue that the notion of a "centre of self" into which a person can contract, pertains to what a person "feels" and "shows" more than who they essentially are', but for me the lines that we draw between those manifestations of self are...artificial.  In this episode, I look at the words we use to refer to "being ourselves", and how important they can be in how we judge ourselves, respond to judgement from others, and engage with the world around us.

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