I've been thinking about this lately. Or something related.
The feeling you describe to me is something like: I have gained new insight into the world / myself, but I haven't yet updated my identity. I'm still the person it made sense for me to be in an earlier context. To move on, you sort of need to dissolve your identity / personality so that it can reshape itself to fit the new context.
This usually happens by mistake for me: I felt it strongly in December when I got sick and had to lay in bed for three weeks, doing nothing. That gave me the space to rearrange my identity to fit what I had learned.
In anthropology, we call those out-of-life states liminality. Typically, all rituals have a liminal phase, where identity is taken before a new one is given. As in the military, when people are stripped of their hair and their names and called shitface for weeks before they are given new identities as solidiers. I think there is some wisdom to this process, creating a space to kill old identities to prepare space for transformation.
A friend who works a lot with rituals said about this that a ritual (including the liminal state) can be seen as a process that lets you access new agent states, where new affordances become avaliable to you. I'm not sure exactly what to make of all of this - but I think it might be valuable to explore rituals (say, secluding yourself in the woods without internet etc) as a way to accelerate transformation. Loose thoughts. Good to see you writing.
I've been thinking about this lately. Or something related.
The feeling you describe to me is something like: I have gained new insight into the world / myself, but I haven't yet updated my identity. I'm still the person it made sense for me to be in an earlier context. To move on, you sort of need to dissolve your identity / personality so that it can reshape itself to fit the new context.
This usually happens by mistake for me: I felt it strongly in December when I got sick and had to lay in bed for three weeks, doing nothing. That gave me the space to rearrange my identity to fit what I had learned.
In anthropology, we call those out-of-life states liminality. Typically, all rituals have a liminal phase, where identity is taken before a new one is given. As in the military, when people are stripped of their hair and their names and called shitface for weeks before they are given new identities as solidiers. I think there is some wisdom to this process, creating a space to kill old identities to prepare space for transformation.
A friend who works a lot with rituals said about this that a ritual (including the liminal state) can be seen as a process that lets you access new agent states, where new affordances become avaliable to you. I'm not sure exactly what to make of all of this - but I think it might be valuable to explore rituals (say, secluding yourself in the woods without internet etc) as a way to accelerate transformation. Loose thoughts. Good to see you writing.