Postal Portals is a new series of letters between myself and friends, intended to serve as a long-form medium to deep-dive into a snapshot of each other’s thoughts and emotions in an asynchronous manner. Often, when we catch up with close friends we haven’t seen in a while, there’s a lot of tangible ground to cover (physical events that happened, the progression of life, etc.) which doesn’t touch as much on the emotional and mental states we occupied and shifted from. These postal portals provide a gateway for the world to an excavation site of those internal states. This was inspired by The W Letters that my friend Jamie curates, so if this sort of thing interests you, go check that out too! See the full list here.

This was written in response to The atomized self, and the 6th letter in the correspondence between Avery and I. See the full list.

Monday 9:48PM

Home at my desk in San Francisco after a fireworks + travel-filled weekend and coming back from a couple weeks in New York City.

Dear Avery,

Your characterization of our different selves resonates with me. I do wonder if a true, consistent holistic self is achievable. It feels like our holistic selves are often in conflict with each other: we say we want to dedicate more time to that new project, yet we find ourselves filling our time with the new social commitments emerging from the cinders of lockdown life. Atomized selves and segmented fragments of identity, I agree, feel like capitalistic vehicles for efficiency and a strict classification and hierarchy of value. Those sorts of boxes also feel like being stuck to me, and it certainly makes my skin crawl to know that it’s a common practice of both the advertising trade as well as our social traditions to characterize, stereotype, and categorize.

I’ve always felt like different parts of me emerge at different moments and environments in my life. When I go home, a part of me feels pulled towards my high school self, afraid of independence and embarrassed to admit my passions. When I play video games, I feel like a kid again, endlessly curious and incredibly addictive. When I travel alone, wandering new streets and crashing in cozy cafes, I feel the courage from when I traveled alone to Taiwan to teach English for a month. I recently discovered I have a lot of teeth problems after I finally visited a dentist after a long time. I felt scared and angry and embarrassed and vindictive. I should have known better. Why didn’t I come sooner? Why didn’t anyone force me to do this when I was little? Later, I’m tossing around jokes about my state of affairs and feeling grateful for catching it before it got worse, despite the unfortunate news. I swapped between scarcity and abundance mindsets in the span of a day, so I’m left wondering: what is my holistic self?

I recently read you have what you want, a consistent newsletter read for me (would recommend!), and in it, Ava presents Carl Jung’s idea of a shadow self, a representation of the unconscious desires that we don’t openly vocalize. The different selves that come up in the varied environments and occasions in our life reflect flavors of this shadow self. They each have different desires and personalities and quirks, but they represent an authentic piece of ourselves. And given that our selves are heavily influenced by our surrounding stimuli and contexts, systems and structures seem to overwhelmingly dictate our identities. A prison environment of good vs. bad might just turn everyday people into cruel monsters. A supporting community can be the difference in a child defaulting to kindness after they grow up. Our surroundings dictate which face of ourselves shines through and which ones thrive in the sunlight.

Coming back from New York, I’m well acquainted with the environmental tug on my identity. Steeped in the musky summer energy that emanates from the city, between the gleaming skyscrapers and hot subway steam and bustling people, I felt compelled to do more. The city beckoned for the hustler within me, the version that grinds on projects and throws themselves into every social commitment available. It called forth the version of Spencer that matched the charming but detached socialite x dedicated but burnt out banker x creative but lost artist x many many more personas that felt like they were being called upon. Did you notice anything similar when you lived in Taipei vs. when you returned to the similarly hot Houston?

I presume my holistic self straddles some hodgepodge of all these multi-faced avatars. It’s like a well diversified asset portfolio, a conglomerate of a slice of existential angst with a growing wedge of courage and a well of optimism. I like cocktails and coffee and yummy food, while I’m wary of it for its effect on my weight. I like the act of experimenting with new ingredients to create things to consume and be experienced by the senses. At the same time, I’m always anxious about whether the new combination will be good, my perfectionism and phobia of waste getting in the way of play. I think our holistic selves are the ones that come out when we’re in an environment where we feel safe. One where we feel like we can stretch and let loose and play. Where do you feel safe and what does that holistic self look like?

The Internet has also compelled us to develop multiple different personas. On different platforms, we inhabit different personalities, catered to the specific app’s feel. What comes off as caustic and funny on Twitter might be taken as serious and marketing-driven on LinkedIn. As a result, problems come up when these contexts collapse onto each other when people of differing personas interact at the touch points. As the number of platforms and the overall internet presence of people continues to increase, I think our relationship to and characterization of our holistic selves will only become more important in having a solid foundation to hold onto in the storm of context collapse and identity fracturing that the Internet undergoes at every moment. How can we bridge people of different identities and different communities?

This is one of the main questions I ponder, around the crumbling of our shared truth and the explosion of the contexts and personalities we need to maintain in our normal digital life.

Your ponderer and rambling friend,

Spencer

See all the letters.

spencer’s paradoxes

📬 Postal Portals - Avery #6: different…