Fling
Oregonian, definately.  I do share the American experience with other parts of the country, but there is a frontier mentality out here that you don't get anywhere else.  And a connection to the land that is missing from other parts of the country.  Except maybe California, which is 20 years or so ahead of the rest of the country anyway...

Tilly
How strong are various assumptions about other states and stuff?

It isn't so much a "state" thing (except for California) as is it is a "region" thing...

.........

Tilly
There is that saying, 'people don't change, things do' I am trying to pick that apart and sort out the truth of it. On a micro level, we do change, we fall in and out of love, we get a little wider, our skin a little slacker, we learn and develop our way through life. The changes are huge from the moment we are born, till the moment we die.

Fling
But you're really only talking about surface change here. Even the falling in and out of love bit is a surface thing.  None of these changes affect the core of your personality, or the essence of who you are, your soul.

Tilly
I would be extremely worried if you *could* turn around to me and say, 'well in a nutshell, this is my identity'. Anyone who wraps themselves up too tightly in the cloth of one aspect of their being strikes me as being someone to be deeply wary of.

Fling
Well I *can* say that!  :: giggle::  I just can't quantify it.

I'm not talking about claiming one aspect of identity as the whole enchilada... but I do have a handle on what identity is, what it means to me.  What I mean to say is that I have this deep awareness that every thing that I am now, I have always been. Personality is supposedly set by the time we are 8 or ten years old.  But even before personality there is something deeper.  The core of me, who I am, who I will always be.

There are parts of that core that I know very well, others I haven't discovered yet, but I do know that it is eternal.  I don't know how I know this, but I do.  And I'm not just talking about faith here.  This is not blind belief in something that I've been conditioned to accept.  It's just something that I know on a very deep level,  and I don't even question it's existance.

At best I can manage to tell pieces of who I am, and hope the reader will make up the rest of the story based on something approximating the truth.

It's about all I can offer in the way of identity...