As the years wear on, it becomes more and more difficult to fill out pages like this one. It's not that I am so immensely profound and complex as to defy definitions, and it isn't that I lack in literary acumen (this particular brain came equipped with a fairly decent "expression" module, though it does suffer from an tendency to ramble, overexplain, and overdescribe).
It's just that, well, the further along I get, the less of "me" there seems to be. It is, apparently, a medical issue. Certain circumstances have made me susceptible to long stretches of dissociation, depersonalization, and derealization. Some of it has to do with neurodivergence and masking. I have been operating on so many levels of masking for the better part of my lifetime that I can no longer remember what the so-called "real" me is supposed to be like. And, of course, the isolation and alienation that the prevalent social order explicitly encourages and cultivates in all of its subjects is also a significant contributing factor.
That said, the "I" that I can scrounge together around a core of pure observation-consciousness is, I suppose, just about as real as anything: a socially stilted, trauma-molded, graysexual nonbinary person with a penchant for niche special interests, a Bachelor's of Fine Arts, in Painting of all things, and a compulsion to make things that seems to supersede other desires and, in the end, will probably kill them in the most prosaic, brutal, and unromantic way possible.
I am swiftly approaching 40. Just a little under two years left before I'm to my fourth (or fifth, depending on how you look at it) round number. I have never managed to get over my quarter life crisis, and now I've got a midlife crisis to heap on top of that. It's all very tiresome. I am not necessarily sure that having a firmer "sense of self" would really be an improvement at this point. Perhaps, it is better to embrace what I had never been able to change and likely never will. Perhaps, it is time to transcend personality and become a node of pure, unadulterated power.