Wrong With Kate

“Okay, but what’s wrong with Kate, exactly?” My roommate sets down the novel with a sigh, ready for another long winded discussion on the English reading.
I just stare at her for a second and takes incredible restraint to reply “I don’t know,” instead of “Nothing.” I want to explain that there’s nothing wrong with Kate. She’s okay, she’s just lost, she’s just looking for herself, she’s just trapped by her pendulum of a dialectic. But I know that Kate is not okay. I know that Kate isn’t okay because I’ve been rehearsing okay in the mirror for years. I know what okay looks like. Okay is staring at the ceiling at 4 AM wondering “What’s wrong with Kate?” and then pretending to have slept well last night. Okay is writing a poem instead of an essay
They see her as a puzzle to be figured out, so much less human than Emily or Binx or Sam. To me, however, she is uniquely human because she struggles intimately and desperately with self-identity and so exhibits the same continual and traumatizing shattering and reformation of identity that I have experienced throughout my life. She cannot maintain an identity for particularly long because she is acutely aware of the flaws of each of her successive masks as well as the immense pressure associated with maintaining them. When describing this feeling, she says “I am straining every nerve to be the sort of person I was expected to be and shaking in my boots for fear I would fail” (Percy 115). She knows that this pressure will inevitably destroy her identity and spends her life terrified of being no one. The more success she has in maintaining a particular identity, the more desperately she clings to it, the harder it becomes to sustain.
These changes in her sense of self and of self-worth are jagged and sudden. She develops a self, inhabits it for as long as she can bear, then all at once it breaks. This cycle can only repeat itself because she must immediately seek a new self, a new identity, some other type of person to become. I have come to describe my version of this process, which Percy calls the swinging of her dialectic, as shattering. The destruction leaves me with only splitters of self-identity
Kate explains this in an ecstatic rush: "I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself." In this moment of realization, she loses her most recent in a series of carefully crafted selves and replaces it with nothing. It is impossible for us to maintain this void, and so this highest ecstasy is followed by the lowest despair. If being no one is our deepest fear, why is the void the happiest state of being for us? When we realize that we can be nothing, that is, that we can escape our own expectations of who we are supposed to be, we are free. Kate explains this realization in an ecstatic rush: "I had discovered that a person does not have to be this or be that or be anything, not even oneself. One is free.” (Percy