Identity, Success, and Dissociative Personality Disorder
(rough draft/unedited)

For every situation, there is an identity to which the scenario constitutes a win-state. The average man being tortured has lost, but masochist is in his element. The average barren women is depressed, a career woman uninterested in offspring is relieved. Of course, this revelation is mostly useless. Few of us have the ability to rewrite ourselves significantly, much less fast and well and into the correct enough person to win in every instance. More than that, to do so goes against some deep and potent need for an Identity, a definition. Even if that was not an issue, there is a resilience to personality and perception that is difficult to bypass and due to this, little chance that some scenarios will be provided with the appropriate champion persona. An ambitious, hard-working type with definite plans that gets laid-off and blacklisted from a high level occupation is unlikely to be made of the traits that the type that would revel in exile because that type would almost never have reached so far. Conversely, because we work towards those goals which we hope and assume reflect our personality-defined win-state, we do have a better rate than chance of being the right person for the big moments. This doesn't help as much as it should, not thanks to a lack of mercury in the spirit, but in that there exists a third set of personalities: those which contain self-defeating definitions of win-states. This can be thanks to the basic nature of success in that every victory gives you a better view of how much higher you could climb. With five dollars, you can better imagine having ten. Because of the nature of the mental mechanisms which allow us to pursue long-term goals, it's also common for a defined victory condition to be less satisfying than the pursuit. This can be circumvented slightly by putting a positive spin on individual moments, but it's rare that it's avoided entirely except by gold-fish and the unusually in-the-moment.

Changing personality is possible, it happens not so uncommonly. Traumas, epiphanies, ardurous months of redefinition are all vehicles for self-alteration, though any of them can come from outside and external influences have no preference in what change they work on an individual. Few people have a knack for it and so we get half-formed identities peppered with contradictions subtle or sternum-piercing, wannabes, and nervous breakdowns from the stress of attempting perfections or ill-fitting clothes. Even those that can work auto-alchemy are often uncomfortable doing so as there nearly always an aspect of chance that may sour the creation and that there is the simple fact that becoming a new person by definition will invalidate much of the old, though if it doesn't there then runs the risk of slipping back into an old skin and old habits, erasing the work of months. So you run the risk of becoming something, someone, less well-adapted to the place and time you've found yourself and if the option of screwy inner-lycanthropy is being considered, it's certainly because you've found yourself ill-suited to where you are while you're there meaning the risk is that of even greater loss than you're currently enduring. And then, if you change and the scenario is only brief, the difficulty of changing again is unstandardized with some shapes sticking more strongly than others. More than that, the new person you are might have the right outlook only to find all your old skills don't fit, leaving you with stronger hands perhaps but a lack of tools. Many resources can be loss, if only because their promoted status is negated. The goals you were so close to that inertia can carry you the rest of the way may become little more than unnotable, unworthy happenstance when someone new lives with your parts. You could be so close to wooing that woman all you needed to do was smile one more time, but after becoming that good and focused professional you needed for work, that one smile never occurs to you. Or the reverse and becoming a soppy easy-goer misses your meeting for you and all that other ambition is toppled over and if the girl was a one-night stand or the job just temping and you eventually return to the old you, all the work of the majority is gone. Most of us are who we are for long enough that big things may be nearly done by the time we change, wasting our time and effort. Of course, most people only change slowly, a long-term adaptation you'd never notice if you were there with them, so sluggish that the water can boil before we notice it's getting hot in here (or that we realize all that paper means we're wealthy now). For those of us that do, though, it's a delicate equation of price and transaction, weight and counterbalance and evaluation of the profit en potentia. And it's hard, too. To decide whether or not to be proactive or let the moment wash over us in the hope of fading time. To trade wallets with a stranger. To let our past be a sunk investment. To give up our projects and patterns and habits in the hope that new pursuits will yield bigger payoffs. To hope that all the reinforcement of the old and poorly working self won't be so much that in trying to change, we only twist ourselves broken like Jenga on a spinning plate, that the new self is as right as we predict it to be, that we can salvage something from the Beforetimes like survivors of an ineptly written apocalyptic novel or that the pain we're escaping really is bigger and longer than joy we're paying with for our escape. The uncertain future makes it hard. Makes a wrong choice feel like our fault when passive victimization is at least the fault of others. Or so we tell ourselves.