Idk if it’s helpful to you, but I kinda like to think of myself as a “black box.” I don’t know how I work but I know the results that I produce. I know what I like when it happens, so I try to try as many different things as I can to see what comes out.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that being hyper self-conscious of the Self is what makes us feel so mutable. I think NT thought normally terminates after “wow that sounds like me” instead of spiraling into “does that really sound like me? what defines me? am I telling myself that I have this identity to feel part of an in-group that I don’t necessarily have an ethical right to access?” A way that I heard it that gave me some amount of peace was the idea that most people don’t ask the question in the first place unless they’re likely to be a member of such a group. If you spend a lot of time wondering if you’re autistic for instance, you’re probably autistic because allistic people don’t do that really. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the mutability of my Self, and the conclusion I’ve drawn that works for me is to to identify as autistic and communist, and not worry about the rest. Which is easy to say for me I guess as someone whose deepest sense of mutable gender and sexuality is feeling incompatible with standard western masculinity but not caring enough about that to go to he/they pronouns or any of the rest.

Like am I an actual person under the onion of layers of masks I made to mirror people’s personality? Or have I become the onion? And then I end up wondering if I’m NPD, and yeah I should just stop ugh

I think everyone is the onion and you’re just hyper aware of it. Everyone is really the combination of people that have influenced them at different times in their lives, with different carry over effects from the previous moment. You don’t have to have the labels, and maybe accepting that labels can be pretty unhelpful is something to work on. I’ve just been a lot happier personally since I stopped really worrying about it as concepts that wouldn’t need to exist if capitalism didn’t commodify literally everything. Everything is sort of a spectrum anyway, including gender and sexuality in many ways.