I'd have to answer that in my dreams I am my current age. At least I am not aware of an age difference.... For the most part all my dreams take place in the present.
Now in a mirror, I do see myself despite the mirror reversal. As a photographer, I was very used to seeing myself in photos so no problem there either. Also, I am familiar with how my voice sounds to others since I was an early experimenter with tape recordings. So I guess that I have no body image problems, other than I dislike the small pot belly that is developing as I age.
Bagoas (imported) wrote: Sat Aug 12, 2006 10:52 am
I am that I am. (Peace, Yahweh. There's no copyright on that sentence.) I am the entity which uses this body (whatever it may look like now) for the execution of its will. The personality of this entity is the product of the totality of my experience. The essence of the entity is unknowable. It is I. I am that [which] I am. The association with the image in the mirror is only superficial.
That pretty much sums it up for me too. All I'm looking for is the truth.
Yes, I see exactly who I am, the good and the bad, this happens when you have years of therapy, you look at yourself in total honesty. I did not say you would like what you see, but you will see yourself just as you are.
Who's to say I exist at all, other than as a lump of flesh and a mental construct? That construct can change with experience and with new ways of thinking. Just as different people may have different views about me, and as my behavior might change from one situation to the next, I might see myself in limitless ways. So it seems that identity is nothing more than a generalization we build to understand ourselves, rather like characters in a novel. We are our own creations, our own fictions. We need a sense of ourselves in order to act, so we speak as if we were stable and clearly delineated, rather than a jumble of inconsistent and often contradictory physical impulses, learned behaviors, and abstract ideas. Since our identity is just a mental construct, it's fragile and can easily be broken down. Real castration isn't simply the loss of some body parts. It's the loss of our selves.
There's always tension between our identities and the people and things that may verify or deny that identity. People are thought to be delusional or crazed to the degree that their sense of themselves differs from what others think.
We live our lives as performers before an audience, seeking not applause, but concurrence with the identity we wish to claim for ourselves. When young, I often felt uneasy about my own existence, as if I might blow away like dead leaves in the wind. Now, an accumulation of habits and repetitions clothes me in a shabby sort of identity, like a worn coat, deserving only to be discarded, but kept because there's nothing to replace it. When I die, nothing will happen but the decay of my flesh.
Many writers have had fun with this business of woozy identity. I think especially of Edgar Allen Poe, Franz Kafka, and H.P. Lovecraft. The vulnerability and mutability of identity has always been a source of horror. One finds the same thing in fairy tales about enchantments and transformations.
As a photographer, I was very used to seeing myself in photos so no problem there either. Also, I am familiar with how my voice sounds to others since I was an early experimenter with tape recordings. So I guess that I have no body image problems, other than I dislike the small pot belly that is developing as I age.