Will The Real Karissa Please Stand Up

Returning to the place of my birth has begged me to ask many questions of myself, namely, "Who am I?" Who am I really — the 'me', distinct from the me that has been socialized to be as such. I am at this very interesting impasse in my life, perhaps a quarter-life crisis, perhaps a little ephiphany, but whatever the case may be, I feel that I may be on to something — though, I have no idea how to describe it with the vocabulary I've acquired in these short twenty-four years.

Being "home" with my mother, around my family, around the characters and institutions I've grown up around and in, when I myself who I am, in relation to them and apart from them, I realize that I have no idea what the answer is. The idiosyncrasies I thought unique to my person, are actually not unique at all, and are merely things I've picked up along the way, like a big ball in Katamari Damacy.

Quick example: I have this obsessive compulsive tendency with my handwriting. When I write by hand, I often do not get past a sentence before I ball the piece of paper up and start again on a new piece. I will do this over and over again, until I give up and stop. But one thing I can successfully write by hand, is my name, over and over and over again. I style myself as an artist, or I once did, yet I never was a doodler. But I always did and still do write my name over and over again or the names of others or certain words.

At my mother's house, recently, I came across a legal pad that once belonged to my sister. I opened it up, and her name was written in it a couple of times, in addition to other names, in the margins and in between various notes. Here is something that I thought was my very own, and though I knew, somewhere in my mind, that this was something that my sister did. But I had somehow blocked it out as the source of my own habit, which has apparently spiraled into some sort of obsession and dissatisfaction with my own hand.

When I look back at my behavior and reactions and beliefs and ideas, I find that I can connect them all to something outside of myself, some circumstance or some word that has impressed itself upon my psychology.

If I cataloged all of these instances, and brushed them all aside, what would be left?

Would that be the real me?

Or would it be nothing?

And if it's nothing, what does that mean?

Wed, Nov 4, 2009  Permanent link

RSS for this post