Dispatch #04: I don't really know who I am

My Identity, A Pizza & René Margritte

Just 20 minutes ago I was on the way to the grocery store to grab my sorry attempt for dinner (which by the way is a gluten and dairy free pizza and some vegan cocktail sausages - delicious if you ask me but we’re digressing) and this thought popped into my head and I said to myself: ‘I don’t know who I am.’

I know what you’re thinking, frozen pizzas, vegan cocktail sausages, hyperbolic and nihilistic declarations - it’s a mid-twenties crisis. But I implore you stay with me for a second because in that exact moment, I have never had a thought so sobering. Perusing the frozen section (am I the only one who has deep thoughts in grocery aisles?) , I thought about my digital identity and how I’ve crafted it and I couldn’t help but feel a disconnect between who I am and who that fictitious version of myself is. It’s not that there are any distortions towards the way I look or how my life is - in fact it’s not really that far off. What bothers me is that I don’t connect with what I put out there, it’s like I haven’t really decided who I want to be (do you just wake up and decide?) and what stares back at me is this confused, muted version of myself. I guess the problem is that this starts to debase who I am in the real world with other people.

Naturally, I have always been apt to people please, which allows you to be quite fluid with who you are. As you can imagine, the problem with that is you never really establish resolute foundations of being. Take for instance my wardrobe, which I also feel completely disconnected with, it’s a confused collection of athleisure, pretty billowing blouses and things that just can’t go together. And it’s my fault, I am so incredibly influenced by what surrounds me and what I digest off and online, that what represents who I am is metaphorically like a botched patch-work quilt held together by loose threads. I want to be everything, so I’m not really anyone.

In the span of writing this, I’ve happily chomped away at my pizza. I want to say that tomorrow I’ll be exactly who I want to be but I think these things take a lot of work. You need to chip away at the parts of you that feel inauthentic, which can be hard because you also need to identify what is you and what isn’t. I’ll give you an example, I know that writing is a real part of me, it’s probably the only part of me I can’t fake. Writing for me has never been about escapism, I truly can only write about what I know, what I feel and what I experience. I write poetry when I’m in love, or when I've been heartbroken, I write stories about people I know and I write these posts about the things I think. Each piece is charged with a surging tide of emotion and putting pen to paper feels like coming up for air.

I’ll end with this from René Margritte, a surrealist painter whose work sometimes touched on notions of contemplating one’s identity:

“Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see, but it is impossible… There is an interest in that which is hidden and which the visible does not show us. This interest can take the form of a quite intense feeling, a sort of conflict, one might say, between the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.”