(Title stolen from, but unrelated to, Angel Dust)
Do you know who you are? Of course you do. You can look around at your life and see the answer as plain as day. Your job, your home, your (sex) toys, the people you choose to be stuck with, it’s all kinda just a physical manifestation, or representation of you, right? I mean, obviously we’ve surrounded ourselves with the things that make us happy, so that must say something about us. Right?
But why is it then that sometimes we’re just so sick of it all? Slowly falling out of love with one part of our lives at a time? Some of this shit, not
only can we not remember getting it, but we can’t even remember why we would’ve wanted it in the first place. So who was it that said this is what we wanted? Oh yeah, we did. These are the fruits of the seeds we planted long ago.
You know who you are, right? Of course you do. You remember, maybe it was high-school or college, after you did that stint as a ‘rebellious youth,’ by the time you came out of that you’d ‘found yourself,’ or whatever less melodramatic people call it. You might not be able to recall too much from that time, but you remember being sure of that. Like you were so sure of everything back then, back when the world was still black and white, before it all went and grayscaled on you.
Most people figure out who they are, and/or what they want to be, in their late teens or early twenties. This is when we set into motion the machinery that will carry us throughout the rest of our lives. Or at least until retirement, rehab, or revolution. The thing is though, no one ever told us that that’s fucking insane! The powers-that-be tell us we cant be trusted with beer at that age, but that that’s when we’re supposed to be laying the groundwork for how we’re going to spend our time until we die. No one ever mentions that every conversation we have, every sunrise and set we see, and every truck-stop quicky, changes us a little. (Or if anyone did say it, we weren’t listening because we knew everything, and we knew it better than they did.) Eventually though, we stumble over that little nugget of ‘ha-ha fuck-you’ when we wake up one day and realize we’ve lost that person we found half a lifetime ago, but we’re still surrounded by their ridiculous and useless shit!
But look on the bright-side, it’s nothing a little structure fire can’t fix.
Of course you know who you are. You’ve got a head full of memories. What are we if not walking autobiographies? The thing is though, the more science finds out about how we remember things, the more it learns that we’re all so much more full of shit than even we, ourselves, had imagined. We all know that we can sometimes sacrifice the truth upon the alter of Good Story Telling, but what most of us don’t know is that this happens every time we recall something.
Experiments on how we encode memories suggest that instead of being like cold, hard, surveillance footage, our memories are really as viscous and malleable as fresh oil paint. But to relate our brain-meats to a computer anyway, whenever we open up a file in our memory, that file becomes extremely vulnerable to accidental editing. So when we’re retelling a story; the situation we’re in, the way we feel, who’s underwear we’ve got on, and the people we are at that moment, all inadvertently change that memory. So the next time you recall it, it’ll have a little different tone, or even details. And after a while, that can really add up. Therapists are now using this to help soften the flashbacks for sufferers of PTSD.
In short, all we think we’re sure of about our pasts, and thusly ourselves, are really just shifting lies we tell ourselves, often to reduce cognitive dissidence… Or at least that’s the way I remembered learning it.
But none of that matters, you know who you are because you know how you think and feel about things, right? But really what we think of as ‘emotions’ are an insult to feeling. We like to believe we feel things in simple, black-and-white, easy to describe ways, but really most of the time our real feelings about things are so nuanced there are no simple words for them. Like, dislike, indifferent, love, hate, mad, sad, scared, happy, disgusted, and aroused, are all oversimplifications that can’t capture the complexities about how we really feel about most things. This can cause real confusion when someone or thing won’t fit in the little box we try to keep it/them in in our heads.
Also (though we might re-wright our memories to convince ourselves otherwise) we’re constantly changing our opinions over time. Think of all the things you’ve done that you said you’d never, all the things you now see from an older, and wiser of course, point of view. Think of your changes in taste; music, priorities, lovers, places to live, hopes for the future. And I bet there’s been a whole lotta change over the last 20 years. So were we more or less ‘us’ back then? How about in the years to come?
But wait, I’m just over complicating things, I have a tendency to do that. You can just go over to the mirror and see who you are. But the person reflected back at us in the glass has grown, taller, wider, and grayer (in some cases). Definitely not the same person we see in old photos. Not outside or in. In fact, if we compare pictures of us from the early part of our lives to ones from the end, no one would be able to tell they were the same person. One day you’ll be staring naked into a mirror trying to find the young, beautiful, healthy, person you are today. Enjoy your-self while you can.
Science tells us that thanks to regeneration; every single cell in your liver is replaced with a brand-spanking-new one every 300-500 days. Thank fucking god. And all your Red Blood Cells are new every120 days. The cells of your skin every 2-4 weeks. The lining of stomach and intestines every 5 days or so. In short, every 7-10 years just about every cell in our bodies is new. And we are, down to the molecular level, different people.
So why do we feel we need this illusion of a consistent us? Is it really better to be stuck with it rather than lost without it? People are like that, 9 times out of 10 we’ll choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
Do you know that there’s no such thing as a funnel-cloud. Or at least there’s no cloud in there, just spinning, clear, wind. It looks like a cloud from far away because it’s all filled with dark dirt and debris. Like a whirlpool there’s isn’t really anything solid that makes a cyclone. They only have the illusion of being solid things, really they’re made up of always new; air, water, detritus, household-pets, slow children, or whatever they can snatch. Always new things spiraling in and out. Not even its shape the same as it dances and wriggles and bends itself into sometimes almost unrecognizable patterns. People are like this. For some reason we like to think of ourselves as consistent things, but that’s just another frumpy lie. This one tries to keep us living up to narrow and outdated definitions of ourselves. This lie doesn’t want us to know who we truly are.
Do you know who you are? Damn fucking right – you’re a Human Tornado.