In Pieces

Who am I? What are we? Where do the edges bleed into each other?

I find myself bewildered, pondering the truth of our identities restlessly every time the issue comes up. “That’s just the way I am.” An all-too-common scapegoat.

To say that we each have a unique identity is, so it would seem, an inadvertent subscription to the very unpractical concept of the human soul - that supposedly “unmappable” section of the human brain wherein lies the unexplainable things about us. I have always grappled with the concept of the unique identity. It seems to me that what we see as such is nothing more than a conglomerate of various preferences and patterns of behavior. Each of these things, when taken individually, has a perfectly explicable history or cause. So, where am “I”? Any time I try to locate it, it disappears - dissolves. It’s like trying to pluck a tiny speck of dirt out of a glass of milk with my fingers. Or like digging through sand to find that particular grain that makes them all a beach.

As I’ve grown into what might be considered the standard-issue college student, I’ve come to feel that it is impossible to qualify exactly what my role is here or what I’m studying. I call myself an English major. I no longer have a solid concept of what that entails. I’ve fallen into some strange new limbo, where studying “English” really means studying “Everything.” And the more I learn about Everything, it seems, the less I know about it and the less I understand myself. It feels fraudulent to even use the term. “Myself” is not someone who exists, who deserves isolating, who is able to stand on her own. I don’t know who I am when I’m alone, anymore.