I too have wanted to become indecipherable, rather than reduce myself to any single formula.

But if I refuse to describe myself at all, then I’m left unable with no means to understand myself. Maybe that’s fine? But I suspect this makes it harder not only for others to connect to me, but for me to learn what I want, what I’ll enjoy and appreciate, what might challenge me, and so forth.

Maybe the solution is to be pluri-decipherable — like Iris Murdoch or Fernando Pessoa — rather than indecipherable. Let oneself play many roles and be interpreted through many different dimensions, without being committed to any one position.

Being normal is a nervous place, because you can never finish performing your relation to it; on the other hand, being comfortable is also another way of thinking about what normativity provides, because if you pass as normal then you can scoot under the radar. The whole question of how you lubricate the social order never stops being difficult, and it never stops being a matter of shame, because when one confronts one’s own ambivalence and incoherence one feels in a bad faith relation to the model of ethical solidity we expect from ourselves. But what if we just trained ourselves to accept that all of us are incoherent, subject to a variety of aversive and connective impulses that we are always managing? The social then would be a totally different space of intimacy and anxiety.

∆ Lauren Berlant, The Broken Circuit (interview)

Being normal is a nervous place, because you can never finish performing your relation to it; on the other hand, being comfortable is also another way of thinking about what normativity provides, because if you pass as normal then you can scoot under the radar. The whole question of how you lubricate the social order never stops being difficult, and it never stops being a matter of shame, because when one confronts one’s own ambivalence and incoherence one feels in a bad faith relation to the model of ethical solidity we expect from ourselves. But what if we just trained ourselves to accept that all of us are incoherent, subject to a variety of aversive and connective impulses that we are always managing? The social then would be a totally different space of intimacy and anxiety.

∆ Lauren Berlant, The Broken Circuit (interview)

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Western culture, Western religions, and Judeo-Christian morality have all served to pacify human beings into weak, herd-like beings, masking their potential as strong, creative, and subjective individuals with their own values and with authorship over their own life stories. So for Nietzsche, “know thyself” means something more like recognizing and embracing your individuality, your own unique perspectives, to purposefully go against the grain and against the flow of the herd—philosophically, morally, culturally, aesthetically, politically, and otherwise. The Nietzschean notion of authenticity is not merely a matter of looking inward and seeing your own essence, as if that essence were something fixed and necessary; it is a matter of embracing your own creative power to author a life story for yourself that is uniquely suited to you, actively and because of the perspectives and metaphors that you choose to create with which you actively and creatively define yourself.

I too have wanted to become indecipherable, rather than reduce myself to any single formula.

But if I refuse to describe myself at all, then I’m left unable with no means to understand myself. Maybe that’s fine? But I suspect this makes it harder not only for others to connect to me, but for me to learn what I want, what I’ll enjoy and appreciate, what might challenge me, and so forth.

Maybe the solution is to be pluri-decipherable — like Iris Murdoch or Fernando Pessoa — rather than indecipherable. Let oneself play many roles and be interpreted through many different dimensions, without being committed to any one position.