Who am I? Strip yourself of the suit case, moving pod, body bag, kangaroo pouch or fanny pack worth of baggage; lose the growl you developed while being raised by a pack of wolves; rewind to a time when you happily had all your limbs and didn’t believe Manson was the next Messiah. Imagine your Dad didn’t drop you on your head as a kid or that you were just you, not six feuding personalities spawned from years of isolation. Strike from the record all extraneous contributions to your development and return to the only point in time that you remained outside their grasp, conception.
From the moment pa’s juice broke the force field of ma’s pre-packaged baby ingredients the universe shoved its hands into your tub of play dough with the ferocity of child harboring extreme behavior problems. As soon as its fingers even grazed the surface, part of you had been changed, altered, or transformed in some unforeseeable way.
The ability of a single experience, a split-second encounter, a fleeting moment, or the reacting and compiling of all the above to alter our being perplexes yet fascinates me more than when I heard a frat boy yell to his slampeice that his hamster gives better head than her — is that animal cruelty? Should I tell someone? What exactly are the logistics of that? He should get tested. What would Freud say?
And returning to the point, god damnit, who am I? In the purest form what was Lindsey Wehking before the universe made into her now (as tribute to the most synthetic item I can conjure) Twinkie self? Maybe I was the fluffy buttery breading that society just splurged their cream in, or I could just have been the grain of wheat that has taken on a completely unidentifiable form, and while I cross my fingers that I was at least the six cups of corn syrup, in reality, I could have just been yellow dye #5, simply tainting the appearance of my environment’s product. Although the former proposition makes me cringe, it is in effect a bit irrelevant at this point, I am already a nasty, yet delicious when fried, Twinkie. However, I do believe it is important and grounding to at least make the realization that much of who we are today is written by the mediums in which we exist and only punctuated by our concept of the pure self.
Often we take what I feel is too much credit for who we are presently, what we look like, where we are in life, what our economic status is. When in all reality coming out of a different womb, growing up in a different place or even experiencing a minuscule alteration or misfortune could have created a completely different reality. When bad things happen we are all quick to pull the ‘well shit happens’ card, but no one ever says that when good things happen, we automatically assume it is because we deserve it.
There may not seem to be a whole lot of point in thinking about things out of our control like this, but I believe it affects our capacity for empathy, tolerance and humanity. You are not more entitled than any other human being, and if your hand was dealt any differently your life could have been a complete shit-show too. I am not saying this to void all personal responsibility, but to encourage a little more empathy in the world, challenge you, along with myself, to see behind people’s backdrop, and provoke more thought into your personal influence in the world.
You are affecting the people around you more than you might imagine. So try to regularly make a positive human connection: just a smile on the street, patience in the line at the adult video store, a tip to your drug dealer and all in all a refrain from judgment.
