Findingthe “I”
The first question we should all have an answer to is “who am I ?” As long as this question isn’t answered, we go from what we don’t want to be to being nobody.
As far as I am concerned, I navigate life with the ambivalence of wishing to be heard, and the shyness of someone who doesn’t want to be noticed. As if I could only be seeing by accident, by surprise or even more, by mistake. As if I could only take the space someone verified for me first. The most vivid example is when I sing. I love to sing, but if someone says to me “sing!” I’ll answer in the blink of an eye: “no.” So, the only people who’ll hear me sing are the ones passing by the bathroom when I take my shower. This way, I am heard despite myself, almost uncovered. Yet I will make sure to sing loud.
Maybe, if I knew where my place was, if I understood who I was, then to the injunction “sing!” I could happily answer “sure.”
The solution then would be as simple as the answer to this tiny question “who am I?”
Although the answer exists somewhere, it hasn’t come to me yet.
Because between what we wish to be and what we really are, there can be a contradiction. I wish I could be kind, loving, caring, patient and sympathetic, as well as talented and creative.
But the reality is I am ambivalent, sensitive, unpredictable, and emotionally disturbed, as well as lazy and severe. For a given situation, I can have two distinct and opposite reactions, dictated by my mood.
How, then, could I accept the light on me, if I disagree with what there is to see: me?
I don’t want to be emotionally disturbed; I don’t want to be lunatic. What to do then? Refuse to feel what I feel in order to stay aligned with what I aspire to be, and frustrate myself by trying to fit my ideal mold, or accept I feel something I don’t want to feel and disagree with my own nature? Disagreeing with our default state but letting it exist or denying it completely? The shade is subtle but any of these scenarios are satisfying.
According to me, an emotion is legitimate solely by its existence. Unfortunately, my emotions are rarely in line with the picture of human perfection planted in my head. They are rarely kind. On the other hand, they often are the answer to more profound, deeply rooted sorrow that goes beyond the situation by itself, which barely reaches my attention. For example, a man with an aggressive nature, within his words or attitude, will always outrage me: Yet he won’t be the real subject of matter, my traumatisms will. Or even worse; the reflection of my own flaws that I won’t be able to handle.
The real question would be then: Who is the person being created despite myself, this second voice in my head, heavier than the real “I” ? This “I” whom, because of the troublesome other, can’t find its place nor its voice?
I kind of have the feeling that, fluffed with kindness, people around me try to make me understand, by acts and words, who is that “I” I refuse to see. But suffocated by the cacophony of the second, “I” doesn’t exist.
I don’t exist.
Perhaps is it time for that “I”, that “me”, to stop suffering from this injustice, and re-establish what should be.
Perhaps is it time to go find that isolated, sad “I”, lost between the piles of my history’s archives. Knowing how to recognize the “I”, to re-establish its identity, and ceasing denying it. Ceasing to refuse it the light it deserves, that it always had to shrink to the right-thinking other, dictator of decency, that parasite that always told me I wasn’t enough, therefore I couldn’t be loved.
Perhaps is it time to fix this “I”.
