[/media-credit]Who Are You?
That’s a question that pops up all the time. I ask it of myself several times a day, and even spent the entire month of November working on a book that was all about answering that question. Here’s the thing, though, I don’t really know myself all that well. I’m still learning about me. I suppose you could say I’m still in the “get-to-know-you” stage of my relationship with me. I’m taking it slow, though. I really want to know everything about me before I decide to settle down with myself.
I do have a pretty good idea about who I am hoping I’ll be, once I finish figuring everything out.
I want to be a genuinely good person. I’m not sure if I am that now. I try to be a good person, but it is still me trying. I don’t necessarily do the right thing as an instinct. That’s something I want to develop in myself.
I want to turn out to be a rich and famous writer. I know that isn’t what you are supposed to say when you’re a blogger. You’re suppose to say things like, “I write because I want to help people be better at the things I’m good at!” Well, that isn’t true for me. I write for pretty selfish reasons, and I think I should be honest about that. I don’t want to live my life working in a crappy cubicle job. I want to entertain and inform for a living, and I’d like to make a pretty comfortable living at that. I don’t need a lot, but I would like to not worry about money.
The other reason I write, besides the money thing (which hasn’t really started working out for me yet, to be honest), is to help myself just be a better version of me. I’m writing to find out who I am, and I guess that just makes this whole post seem a little redundant.
Maybe I’m looking at this from the wrong angle. I spend so much time with the question “Who am I?” and all of it’s metaphysical and philosophical angles that I forget that it can be a bit more straightforward than that. Most of my basic biographical information can be found on my about page, of which I am very proud.
At the core of it all, I am a man, age 28. I grew up in a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. I’ve moved about the Midwest quite a bit, but I’ve always come back here to roost. I’m a Kansas Citian through and through. I like it here, and I can’t imagine living anywhere else anymore. Of course that also means that I love real barbecue, not that sauceless crap they give you down south, and jazz music. I think our giant shuttlecocks are pretty awesome. I will become a bit angry if you mock my city. I try not to mock yours, but I secretly pity anyone who doesn’t live here.
I grew up as the fat kid, and I have a lot of issues about my weight. Part of the problem with that is my love of food. I am absolutely addicted to fried chicken, and even though it is probably killing me slowly, I find a way to eat it at least once a week. It doesn’t matter if it is still in bird form, or if it’s been blendered down into nuggets. I like eating dead birds. One day they will go extinct and I will probably die, my primary food source depleted.
I suffer from a pretty severe chronic depression, but I’ve been pretty stable for the last year, mostly thanks to discovering new coping mechanisms, like bitching to the internet anytime I feel a little down. It helps that I have found a lot of great friends, especially on twitter. For someone who would much rather sit at home, separate from the rest of the world than go out, it is a life saver having social media around. Feeling lonely sucks, and having friends on twitter, even if they are on the other side of the world, takes that pain away.
I’ve been known to do a bit of doodling on occasion, and am pretty good with sharing them on twitter.
I replay conversations over and over in my head very much willing myself to be able to go back and say the right thing. Sometimes, I catch myself mumbling these conversations to myself. Worse, sometimes other people catch me mumbling to myself.
It’s really bad when I replay an argument.
I’m fairly sure that I have somehow inadvertently convinced the people that I work with that one day I’m going to come into the office packing heat. That is crazy to me, because I do regularly express my preference for wielding a crowbar. Besides, when you work with 90% redneck yahoos, you have to imagine that all of them are carrying something way more powerful than anything I’m going to get my hands on.
I am cynical, but hopeful. I think the world sucks but I believe if we put enough effort into it, we can make it a better place.
I believe in honor, especially in the spread of knowledge and ideas. I think it is more important to learn how to tell right and wrong than I think it is to know how many kilometers goes into a mile.
I have a powerful spiritual faith in God, but I believe that a blind devotion to any one form of dogma is dangerous, deadly, and destructive. I believe that goes for those who practice dogmatic devotion to science as well as religion. A closed mind is a brittle mind, hardened but not tempered. That leaves it easily shattered.
I tend to be both verbose and chaotic when I write. I’m sure you’ve noticed.
One Last Thing:
I don’t always have a binary system for expressing myself, but I do believe that if you sit down and examine an issue from all sides equally, you will come up with a right answer to any question. I think we tend to over complicate some things in our lives, and though there are shades of grey, much more of life is black and white than people think.
Most things simply are or are not honorable.
I worry that too many times in the modern world, we forget that. I know that too many times, we don’t care.