Who Am I ? (An Introduction)
This is an introduction for what I envision this blog to be, a catch-all (fourre-tout) of me with photos, ideas, memories, that I think i’ll have the need to remember, or at least, on the immediate perspective, things I don’t want to forget. Things that I don’t want to be lost forever in the darkness of my mind, things that need to be caught right after they happened so I can get the essence of what I’ve lived. I want to remember.
I want to remember because I dont actually know what “me” is. Or at least, it’s the feeling I have now. Some of you may know who I am and have a clear idea of what “Raphaël” is, but as me, the person concerned, I can tell you I have no idea what “me” means. It’s not like a blur, it’s like a nothing. I can see nothing when thinking about “me”. It feels like an abstract concept that I can’t catch. The idea of a “me”, a clear image of what I am, feels like a very strange concept, one so complex that I really can’t get a finger on what it means. I feel like this “me” exists in the world, but I am dissociated from it, I am in my body, I observe it all the time from a certain perspective (critical) but I don’t feel like I incarnate it.
So I know me starts by being a physical object, a body, a human form living in a society with distinctive clothes and forms of expressing itself. I am a human among other humans with differents traits that all together are a part of the image of “me”. I know when and where I was born (based on a subjective and mathematical way of organizing time and in a certain geopolitical context), what gender i have been assigned, my sexual orientation, what color my skin is, how tall I am, what colours are my eyes (they change), the freckles I have. I also have some personnality traits like being kind (my grandma told me), empathic (a friend told me), I wanted to say that i had a certain sense of humour but only a few things have REALLY made me laugh in the last 5 years. I have a feel for injustice, a also a kind of intelligence and sensibility. I also know the place I occupy in the society I live in. I mean, I have a certain knowledge of the world and its current state of affairs and I have opinions about them which can help define myself as a feminist or an anticapitalist for exemple. Most importantly maybe, I recognize having a special emotionnal attachment to some people, my friends, my family, and some stuff like music or film, or pieces of art, even material objects.
But none of that gives me a clear answer of what I am. All of the above constitutes a portrait of “me” to the outside world, an image of what “I” is (and I realize that may be fine and be the case for the majority of people). But that doesn’t satisfy me.
Now, what I really want, is to get to the essence of who I am. I know my existence is futile and vain in the course of time (he’ll always win #TeamTime) and space, but I still got to live. At least that’s what society tells me and that is what I’m seeing a psychologist and a psychiatrist, because I don’t really see the point of living if you’re going to die anyway. But that maybe is a question for another day. My perspective today is that I still gotta find a way to go through life i guess.
Anyway, “me” is already so many things of the above. Me and the outside world are inseparable, they communicate all the time, it’s illusory to want to escape society, it shapes you even before you were born. The essence of me starts by taking from what is above, from society, and it’ll always come with it, come in it. But you can question it, especially because, even though we live together as a society, I believe our experience as humans is profoundly solitary. You cannot feel and think, be, like anyone else. Here is where I wanted to get. My point is : I think you are what you think and experience. I don’t know if any (famous or not) philosopher already said something similar but that is my conclusion (I mean, your thoughts aren’t only the proof that you should exist, they ARE your existence). You can satisfy (reduce) yourself with what you project to the outside world (because i guess that’s what society tells you to do ? (I swear I’m not trying to be edgy.)), but what makes you, in your own, personal, and ultimately, solitary way, is what you experience. That is the only thing you will truly ever get from life. So, on the basis that you still want to live, maybe your question isn’t “Who am I ?” but “What do I wan’t to get from life ?”.
Being in the middle of a psychotherapy, I found myself deconstructing all the things that shaped me to this day. All I’m doing is taking things that were under the “Raphaël” label. A lot of my preconceived thoughts, opinions, point of views are being torn apart and broken down because I have the time to think about where, when and who they came from. As a young adult, you start to recognize what you couldn’t when you were a child and you start realizing what made you who you are on almost every aspect of your life. It’s not all wrong, because a lot of what you did was true to yourself, and there are things you want to keep, because you recognize they are right and you feel in line with them now.
But mostly, I feel transparent, i feel like i’m free-falling, I feel like I don’t have anything to hang on to and I’m left there, recognizing the person I have been, with behaviors and ideas that I don’t relate to anymore, that vanished from me. But for the moment, nothing is filling the space they are leaving, hence my question : “Who Am I ?” and all this development and the conclusion that you are the answers you provide to these questions, “What do I want ? What do I feel ? What do I want to feel ? What do I experiment ? What do I want to experiment ? What have I learned ? What do I want to learn ? What do I want to be ?”.
So, since I just have a really rough idea of what I really am, glimpses of answers to these questions, I’m going to start to right down my experiences, my feelings, my ideas, what should constitute “me”, “Raphaël”. Maybe I’m just nuts. Maybe (probabbly) I’ll right down things I won’t relate in a month (but we all change, time is just consuming us, not defining us). I’m here for the ride. I believe writing my thoughts and feelings here is going to be key to understand who am I. I need it, or maybe just the process of it. At least, It’ll be out of my congested mind, objective in a way, and I hope so, consistent.
