What makes a person? I asked myself this at one in the night last night as I looked at the half-filled glass of wine near my foot. Then, I got off the rug and decided to play some music on the speaker. The silence is always welcome, but it does not mean a little noise can do us any harm. I chose a song I often listen to when I need to recall how I got to this point in my life, this sunshine-filled endlessness. Then, I asked myself the question again: what makes a person?
And when I ask this, all I want to know is what makes me who I am? I had a friend in school, which now seems to be a lifetime ago, who often made fun of my gait. He said it was too stiff, that it was unnatural. Another friend I came across many years after that said the same thing in slightly different verbiage. I often think about it; it tells me there is something distinctive. What they often call personal style is more than your clothes or what your favourite kind of coffee is. It is usually a potpourri of all these idiosyncrasies, these little minutiae that people notice.
What makes me who I am? When we ask ourselves this, and we cannot find an answer, we turn to others. In the end, all lives are about humanising ourselves. You do not want to be called a hero with songs and poems about how you lived. You do not want to be celebrated, no. You do not want to be painted some demon either, known only for your exploits and only by your infamy. In the end, you want to be a person.
We spend all our time begging for this, from family, from lovers, from friends, from the countless strangers we meet.
“Look at me, and tell me, what do you see?”
And when they waste adjectives and when they hammer hyperbole, our heart sinks.
“A person” is all we want to hear, “I see a person.”
I look in the mirror, and I am not convinced of who I am. I want someone to tell me peculiarities only they notice. For all my words, I cannot write myself a poem. It will be too vain, too conceited. I must wait for others to tell me what I want to hear.