05.30.07
Identity Crisis
I don’t know who I am in any instant but this one. I lost myself some time ago and found something new in a moment of crisis, and I’ve slowly set to the task of finding out where it will lead me. Maybe not radical changes so much as new angles to consider… How often do we really consider what we are?
I feel like I’m different people in each environment and at different points throughout the day and week. In each moment, I’m real, a slice of a continuum that (ostensibly) stretches unbroken forward and back through time. I’ve lost that sense of continuity, though. The past is little more than snapshot memories and rationales for habits-now, and the future is a trillion possible permutations of mes that I’m not. What parts of me persist and what am I now?
Take a deck of cards, face-down on a table. Pull a card off the top, flip it over, and you’re born. Three of Clubs. Flip another. And another, one for every moment you breathe. Today Jack of Hearts, tomorrow a Joker, hopefully someday the Ace of Spades. Each card obscures the one before it, relegating it to memory. The unturned remnants of the deck are unknown except to the extent that every card seen is another tiny statistical constraint on those that remain.
That’s your life, my life, everyone’s life. Not a straight line or a sea of infinite choice, but a series of isolated nows in the middle of was-onces and might-bes. It’s a matter of perception more than anything, but how much do you need to change before you consider yourself a different person? I don’t consider myself the same person as I was 10 years ago. That’s simple enough — little about me but my DNA is the same. I could be my twin or a clone and have even that. Every appreciable part of my identity is distinct from ten years ago.
Five years ago? A year ago? I’ve changed a lot in the last year. I could change just as much in the next. For that matter, throughout the course of a day as I go from morning-rested to evening-tired, my feelings and motives and thought patterns change. It’s all incremental perhaps. It’s the same person with different moods and environments, perhaps. Me+happy+alert or me+bitter+drowsy, but always me?
But then what’s left of me when those transient states and recurring patterns are subtracted away? The only truly unsharable and unique part of any person is his subjective sense of self — the experience of being a person reacting to and acting upon everything else. Take my fickle moods and reactions and perspectives and you’ve robbed me of every meaningful subjective component of being. If you subtract away the transient, you subtract away everything that matters.
Out of expediency, each person is considered the same individual throughout their entire life. We have to look at it that way to function properly, I suppose. I think it unfair though. Maybe you draw the same card or the same suit every moment for years on end, but people aren’t ever truly static. What ought to define selfhood — the subjective experience of being — exists in isolation. Each moment has its own self.
And that’s what leaves me not quite sure how to weigh my past and my future. They’re both intangibles; they both exist primarily in my mind. If I made a resolution to myself a month ago and no longer feel the same need, ought I value that past self’s judgment? When I was younger, I wanted to be an artist. Now I want to be an engineer. Do I have any obligation to a person that no longer exists? He’s not me anymore, and he doesn’t exist in any real sense. I could just as reasonably do what a character in a book asked of me.
In the same way, I see that it’s useless to make resolutions for the future. I don’t know who I’ll be. All that’s left of now-me will be vague memories and the words I write. Do I like the thought of what-I-am-now being thrown away and disregarded as obsolete and unimportant? It’s a terribly one-sided thing. I act now and create the conditions that spawn my future self, and he may or may not agree with those decisions or care about the plans made with them. I’m faced with the knowledge that I’m creating myself, yet aware that in doing so I inevitably devalue that act of creation. I feel like I become a stranger with every new moment.