Why did he do it ?
Who was he before ?
Who were they ?
What did she feel ?
Was it always like this ?
I don’t remember, and I don’t know. I don’t want to invent memories, or re-frame the ones I do have. A ‘growing up’ that felt like one side of a conversation echoing into nothing.
I imagine (without being sure of course) that most people get a sense of who they are, or their own self-context through their nearest reflectors. That, we develop our self-concept via the articulations of those internalized by our closest kin.
Void of that, what do we have ?
Whether it is true or not, it is how it feels, that my self-concept was developed as a patchwork of people I didn’t want to be—a string of strangers. So it follows that the very idea of becoming should not be this—that I’ve done it ‘wrong’.
Like starter in sourdough, those who might inform who I am were gone then, and are gone now. Yet, I’ve got so many questions to raise with them.
I feel uncooked..raw. Self-made. Othered into a self-concept of my own making.
But, the very creation of any of us, is in relation to others. Were we on an island, each of us, all alone, we would not need to identify ourselves, because there’d be no-one to witness our ‘who’. You would just be.
Having been observed, but not engaged, for my formative years and even into adulthood, I am finding myself wondering whether I became who I am as a response to my own inner knowing, or in the void left by the absence of reflection.
The post image features a space background with stardust and stars from Mustafa V.
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