Semblance of self, understanding of the id, ego, and super ego; there are many names for knowing the true name of oneself and having accomplished a seemingly impossible task in today’s culture. We are expected to want more, to go beyond, and to crave what we do not have, to never be content, to constantly covet and seek out something just beyond the horizon. While this type of behavior is what drove us as a species to seek out safer refuge, to map the globe, to build the greatest inventions, and even compelled the most celebrated romantics to achieve the heights of their highest success, it has gone from being something beautiful and noble to something twisted and ugly. Altruism, doing what must be done or should be done for the sake of seeing good done in the world, is an all but lost concept, diluted and sullied by a consumer culture that reeks a bit too closely of something Huxley proposed with Brave New World. There is no nobility of self because no one takes the time to see themselves, they see only the blemishes, the loss of something they undervalued when they had it, and look toward the shimmering sky, a canvas awash with dreams and personal fulfillment if only one is willing to trade away the things that really matter.
Smoke because it’s glamorous, be skinny because that’s beauty, have big breasts or a big butt and you’ll be attractive, be selfish and self-serving or a total spoiled bitch and people will think you’re cute, wear what everyone else does, buy, consume, thinking is a weakness…the rhetoric is a bit less ham handed but the message is still just as clear. Everyone sees it. I’m sure there is hardly anyone that can’t see the forest for the tress and stare with minimal effort at how callous and useless the entire consumer culture has become, and yet we press on, apathy allowing the infernal machine to continue its work, heedless of the loss of something so precious. My sense of self is something even I take for granted, but for reasons I think are wholly different than most others. I know who I am. I am in a constant state of change, endlessly evolving, always adapting and accepting. I am not who I was and I am not, now, who I shall be, but I am still me. The sum of the parts is merely the result, not the full construction, the assembly of something so intricate and beautiful as a life, it is something takes, quite literally, a lifetime. There is a complex and worthwhile tapestry of experiences and moments that weave together in a mind bending fashion and they serve to create the person you see. I would not be who I am if not for who I was. This is something I accept, and it has taken me quite a long time to recognize the truth within such a thing.
For the majority, they are constantly looking toward what might be, what they hope for, or what they plan on happening. The family the can have, the children they’ll bring into the world, the car they want to buy, the house they want to live in, the relationship they want to cultivate, the career they hope to pursue, even the clothes they want to wear and the food they want to eat. The dichotomy of this is that most of these people are endless spouting self-affirmations about reveling and enjoying the present. You’ve seen them all, “The past is history, the future’s a mystery, to enjoy the present because it’s a gift”, I mean there are countless others, and I’m not decrying the words as being without merit, but they undercut the intrinsic meaning being espoused by those that seek only to escape the current circumstances of their lives. Unhappy in relationships, miserable at a dead end job, lacking the resolve to even try to better their lives, and it is fear that holds them back. It is fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of asking too much, of being too brazen, of stepping over too many lines, of being beyond the scope of understanding for another that keeps them contained, wrapped in a blanket of anxiety and shadows, whimpering to the nameless forces of defeat and oppression for release from the bonds that they created themselves.
Without realizing it, more often than not we become the products of compromise and fear. We’re taught early on that not fitting in is something to be feared. So grade school is all about having the same lunch box, the same clothes, the same after school activities, and even the same backpack, shoes, pencils, and notebooks as the majority, to be any different is to be outcast. Middle school revolves around constructing identity, and sadly that is too often shaped by misunderstanding. A need to rebel leads to chopped hair or longer than normal, violent arguments, harsh words, music with hollow messages, and mauled, altered, name brand, or unique clothing being used to designate and inform how we see ourselves. High school is…well I imagine it’s about solidifying the person you’ve chosen to be with the gradual acceptance of personal responsibility. I say I imagine it because for me there were three things that I don’t think occurred for me during high school. One, I wasn’t there. I was removed from my peers in my freshman due to a misunderstanding and my proclivities being too far out in the ballpark of my creation. My refusal to fit in and accept what they prescribed I should be fostered further discontent and in my opinion allowed for a malfeasance to breed within those in the power structure. Second, I never had a girlfriend or even got laid in high school. I was a graduate before I had my first sexual experience and it was only a couple of months before that, I laid eyes on a naked woman for my own benefit and stimulation without it being through a television. The third and perhaps most fundamental of all the things that didn’t happen to me during high school is that I didn’t find out who I was. I knew. I had cultivated my persona, become the person I wanted to be, in need of some fine tuning perhaps, but I had no want or will to be anyone other than I wanted to be and I didn’t need the gradual acceptance of personal responsibility. I became my father by the time I was in the seventh grade and I had no gradual or piecemeal program of increased accountability to myself because I had been forced to accept it all years before. My home life was less than ideal and to most of you I’ve relayed the stories of psychotic breaks, verbal and physical abuse, and even the borderline unapologetic emotional neglect that I endured, so I won’t traverse the same material again, but my point is that I was not in need of an identity. I had resolved to become my father but do so in a way where I got all the benefits and made none of the mistakes.
Now most of us become out parents in one form or another. We assimilate little things that we barely notice. A proclivity for our parent’s brand of coffee, cigarettes, alcohol, perfume, clothing, cars, political leanings, outlook on society and family, all of it is informed by our parent’s example to varying degrees. It is an endless cycle that continues ad infinitum since time immemorial. But what happens when the pattern is broken? What is the outcome when we or our parents are left to quite literally create themselves? Well in my case, that is exactly what happened. My father had to build, piece by piece, who he wanted to be. His father is still alive, and he’s a wonderful man, but he is not the most emotionally expressive person and in all the years I’ve been alive I’ve yet to actually hear him tell me he loves me, a trifle in the grand scheme and by no means do I mean to say that my life would have been made in any way markedly different from such a pronouncement, but for the purposes of my point, my father was given a role model but little guidance on how to actually become or emulate his father. To that end my father is the culmination of the highest hopes and intellect, brought down by ill fortune and miscalculated gambles. So in becoming my father I was attempting to recognize what could have made him successful and what had been the highest detriment. I resolved to live as free of vice as I could, seeing a dependency on chemical substances to be a major burden that would hold even the strongest back. It is in this that the genesis of who I am now was spawned.
So if we have the role models of who we will eventually become, who will influence us the most, how do we go about defining our individuality? For most of us we pick and choose from media and other sources and splice it all together in a ramshackle way of producing an identity. We glean quotes from movies, we take ideas from magazines, jokes from television, music from the people we want to be more like and we present ourselves to the world as the combination of our best efforts. The only thing any of us lacks is depth. We don’t understand why we find something funny, why we like what we like, or even why we seek to be the people we attempt to be. It’s all a finely greased machine that is embedded in us from our infancy, behave a certain way and people will like you. The only flaw in that logic is that the people you want to like you are just as two dimensional and vapid as you are. I know that no one likes to think of the people they care about, or even themselves as being anything less than spectacular and unique snowflakes, and I don’t mean to decry or belittle anyone personal sense of self-worth. Rather I want you all to recognize what it is that gives you intrinsic worth. What makes you the spectacular person you are? It is only through questioning that we can come to understand anything.
It’s been said that I’m fearless, devoid of pause or terror. I think there might be truth in that but only in one simple thing. It is an important and popular fact (to quote Douglas Adams) that humanity fears what it does not understand. We all do it. Sky diving, bungee jumping, pig wrestling, cave diving, things that go bump in the night, even our own behaviors, it can all be terrifying. I seek to understand it all. And here’s another point in the current paradigm of our culture and society where a breakdown occurs. At some point in the past thirty years or so, it became an implied expectation that with the advent of cable television, the internet, and different mediums of radio (if Nikola Tesla could see things now, huh?) we no longer had the onus of understanding anything ourselves, someone else was doing it for us. The bogeymen had been found out and no longer lurked in the dark corners of the room between the dresser and the closet. So with that precept in mind, we have become the most jaded and uninspired we have ever been, relegating true understanding to the annals of pursuits best left to others, and no real compulsion to do anything to change it. We have the utmost information at our fingertips, in a way like never before in human history, and the majority of us retain slivers and pieces of anything if we retain anything at all, so any understanding is fragmented and shoddy at best. Enter my oddity and my propensity to actually retain everything, to really come to a full and informed comprehension of everything, and I have no fear. I don’t rely on someone else to have my answer, to protect me from the things I don’t know, I seek out to find my own answers, and in that I am made mighty enough to face down any dragon, slay any beast, go toe to toe with any demon. I am made invincible by the sheer veracity with which I seek information. I am who I have chosen to be, both now and at all points in every possible future. I made my decisions, I owned my choices, and I alone am the only guilty party if blame for any of it is to be given. Hopefully we can all begin to understand ourselves a bit more, to really recognize the good within us, the things that make us the unique and wonderful people we all are, and from that understanding begin to feel real love and actually put forth a bit of that emotion toward the ones we truly treasure.
Profound mind & human being... You are an angel Nick.
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