I was walking around the mall yesterday and I went to the American Girl store to look around. For those of you, Dear Readers, who don’t know what this is, google it. Seriously, it’s amazing, a vast store with nothing but huge, pricey dolls and doll accessories. There is even a salon and make-up counter where your doll can get a makeover. Each doll comes with a book, a story about who they are, and a starter kit of accessories unique to her – an equestrian set for the cowgirl, a surfboard and lay for the Hawaiian girl, Native American ritual objects for the American Indian Girl. Add on items at a charge, of course.

I marveled about how these pieces of plastic were given these elaborate identities. How it’s so natural to build identities with objects that little kids who get these dolls instinctively believe. Become invested. Are able to build ever more stories, with ever more accessory packs.

Its easy to wistfully shake my head at the naivete of children, but doesn’t adult Alana do the same? With just a few wardrobe adjustments didn’t I sell myself the ideas of being (and try to broadcast to the world) Free-Love-Hippy-Alana in college. Smart-Sexy-Professional Alana at my first job, then there was Early-SF-Hipster-Alana, followed by Aspiring-Wealth-Designer-Alana…More recently, this tendency of clothes for identity has loosened a bit. Maybe I have come to understand a little mor clearly, maybe I’m just getting older and it feels harder. But isn’t my body just the same?

For my whole practice, its been easier to consider the clothes, the homes, the car, and see how I use those 4e objects to tell my story. They are the accessory packs. But the body, that seems so much more me, who I actually am. It’s still there when I strip off the clothes after all.

But after seeing Dark Sister abandon her lightsaber (see the last blog post), a new perspective is dawning on me: The body is like the lightsaber, its just something I pour meaning into, and the meaning I pour into it is self –Alana. Since the body stays with me for the entire course of my memory, for one life, it seems more permanent than the clothes and books and homes that come and go. It seems more basic and primal. But the truth is they are the same: Same 4 es, same process of meaningfication.

I imagine my body to be what holds together my narrative, my identity, my imagined future. But are those things in this alana body any more then those storys and narratives are in the doll bodies? If they were, we sure as hell wouldn’t need accessories and books to sell the tale –it would just be who we were.

Meanwhile, if Dark Sister had understood the lightsaber didn’t mean anything, she could have just used it practically for as long as circumstances allowed her to use it. It wouldn’t have to have the heavy, aching meaning, we assign things. It wouldn’t hurt to have, to use and then to loose. But weighing 4es with meaning, it makes them extra burdensome. Even as I sit on a plane, typing this blog, I stress about every sniffle and sneeze I hear, the threat of illness to this beloved body. This is the dukkha my ignorance of objects causes me.

Back at the American Doll store, I had looked at the Hawaiian doll and wondered, with her whole story built around being Hawaiian, what happens if she had to move to New York, who would she be then? Who was I when SF Alana left for NY? Not knowing, feeling lost, it crushed me. Made me hate my new NY life. Over and over I am building my identity off where I live. A New Orleans Alana, an SF Alana, A Miami Alana. Like knowing the streets, or feelin the vibe, or having the neighbors know my name really proves something about myself. Then I have to move. So many times, like 15+ I have moved. Each time has sucked, each left me with a sense of losing my narrative, myself.

It’s not just my attachment to the objects I use to tell my story that pains me, it’s my attachment to the story, the self, that is the root of all this dukkh. Over and over I build identities, and then they are torn down. Never do I stop to consider these identities are fabrications, like the stories crafted by the doll company, to sell the product, get us invested in the tale, claim it, own it, want more of it.

And because I want more, I want to be and become, I am always building anew. New stories, new objects to sell those stories, fresh losses when it falls apart. And the clincher is, its totally arbitrary. I tell the story of an SF Alana because my life circumstances brought me to SF. If I had moved to Hawaii, I would have just as easily become a Hawaiian Alana.

What is arbitrary, what is circumstantial, can’t be who I am. Because what is arbitrary and circumstantial arises based on conditions, sustains based on conditions and ceases based on conditions. And if I am only ever, at most, one in the sea of conditions; part of, and shaped by that sea of conditions; arising, sustaining and ceasing based on a sea of conditions; subject to, not in control of that sea of conditions, than what is conditional can not be me, myself or who I am. This last thought however is a current day reflection. Keep on reading to see how I got here…