Thank you so much, I am pleased to have given you and your coffee a good morning time :)

Have you watched the Startrek clip? Even better would be the whole episode. I was fascinated by this narration because it clarifies something I needed many words for:)

I remember my adolescence where I made the decision to replace my glasses with contact lenses and adopted a certain - copied from others - cheekiness that I practiced from then on. Not that I did it very elegantly, more a growing into adulthood through trial and error. This "from ugly duckling to beautiful swan" was a deliberately chosen role, because I saw that as a young woman one could definitely have advantages in life that I had not been able to use as a child up to that point, because I was a child.

Someone who may not be as genuine may quickly make "role player" changes and be quickly identified as phony by their social circle(s).

My first real boyfriend was a "jack of all trades". At the age of twenty, he had already acquired a lot of general knowledge and developed a sense of trends. There are people like him of whom one says "you can put them in any society and they will fit in without any problems". He was like that and I learned a lot from him. The same was said of me later. It is not so irritating for friends or the social circle who meet you like that if you are already a changeling when they meet you.

At the beginning stages of adulthood I chose to be identified as an alcoholic drug addict. It wasn't until I could see that I was making the ultimate choice to live this identity, and ...

Are you sure? Couldn't it be that you tried drugs and alcohol and enjoyed them at first? Identity not as a conscious decision, but maybe more out of a sense of comfort? From my own experience, I would say that "getting into a scene" is more out of curiosity and a desire to try things out, and "getting out" of it is more of a conscious step because you realise that the scene is holding you too tightly in its claws.

There's a lot of "Stone him!" that comes with this type of thinking of course. Misery loves company :D

HaHa! Well said! I can relate to this. You don't get popularity points if you move away from a shared identity because the others would like to keep you habitual. A political party is an example par excellence in this respect, as deviation is hardly possible there. In external presentation, "unity is a must".

A decision is not ultimate in my view, unless you die shortly after one :) Since we are in the constant process of experiencing and it is indeed the case that we often change identity without realising it, "ultimate", for me, is something thought rather than lived. But if one really believes that one belongs to this or that category, it becomes a problem. Then people experience each other as immobile. "To be real" is, on the basis of my content, "to interact changeably according to a situation". To be inauthentic would be to commit oneself to a role or to become so attached to it that one wants to force one's fellow world to treat one only according to the chosen role. It may seem upside down but I think it's upside down the other way :D

I split my response in two parts. The next is following.