Who Are You?

If I were to ask you, "who are you?", what would you do? Tell me your name, first I suppose. If I were to follow up by saying "OK, I know your name now. But who are you, really? What makes you "you"? What forms your identity, differentiates you from the rest of the human race, defines you as an individual?" You might tell me what you do for a living, or talk to me about your family or your great passions in life. Maybe you love to play the guitar or fly planes. Maybe you collect Pepsi merchandise or 1940s film noir movies. Maybe you love photography or horseback riding or car racing. Perhaps you'd talk to me about how you make an impact in the world. Maybe you volunteer at a local hospital or cook meals for shut in neighbors or visit an elderly aunt on Friday nights. You may even talk about your community, and how well you fit into it and how love you've lived there.

Defining yourself is truly a very subjective task, and everyone will no doubt do so uniquely. But I think it's safe to say that a few of these elements of personality are universal. Family, vocation, interests, and geographical setting are very common ways to find yourself on an existential compass, and all of them are more than likely parts of your life that you more or less take for granted. That is, you don't consider how central they are to your identity until they change or are taken away.

When my father died, I clearly remember standing over his grave, just days afterward, with my mother and my brother, and sobbing as I said, "I don't know who I am without my dad." It was one of those rare moments when you haven't really thought about what you were going to say, but something just arose full blown from your subconscious, unedited by fear or the natural filtering we do depending on where we are and who is around us. It was a statement that I remember hearing myself saying, as if from outside my body, a sentiment that bubbled up from somewhere deep within me, unbidden by spontaneous and raw. Personal truths are like that, I've learned. We can't censor or edit them, and even though we're sometimes surprised to hear them spoken aloud, we can't deny them once uttered. They're what we really feel at a specific moment and there's something freeing about them.

Perhaps a few months later, in a therapy session, I found myself uttering the word "hollow" in response to the question "how do you feel?" Like my statement at my dad's grave, this comment connoted an uncompleteness connected with my dad's passing. Without his strong presence in my life, I'd lost my sense of bearing and identity. His proximity to me was an integral part of "who I was" and without him, I was having a very hard time either reconnecting to that identity, or forming a new one. He was the person I looked for strength from, despite our often heated arguments and our fairly obvious and copious personality differences. He was the one who told me in a quiet but firm and honest aside shortly before I left for college, that if I ever wanted to go home and things got too much for me there, "you'll see that old brown Ford pull up" and he'd be there to take me home.

I suppose I became more doting on my mom afterward, hopefully mostly out of compassion but I'm sure also partially at least from needing a renewed sense of purpose as well. She was 65 when my dad died, did not drive and suffered from agoraphobia, epilepsy and several other physical problems. It's strange that she often intimated to me that when I was born it filled a need in her life at a time when she felt empty and purposeless, after her own mother died. How ironic that in helping her I was likewise able to find purpose again after my dad died. I told her that while my dad always made me feel safe, she had always made me feel loved and accepted.

So I was "whole" again for a while. After my mom died, though, besides the nearly indescribable sadness and loneliness, I once again felt "hollow" and adrift, as if a vital and essential part of myself just no longer existed, and had nothing to take its place. I remember clearly existing in that big, cold, empty house with my brother self entombed in his room, medicating himself on whiskey and television and who knows what else, and me online for hours at a time in mine, two islands in the stream, never connecting or sharing our secret sorrows and fears. I remember taking walks to the cemetery and thinking the entire trip about what on earth I was going to do with myself and what possible point there was in me still moving around on the planet without my mother in it. I remember feeling cold, alone as if whatever animating force had been within me had simply ceased to be, and as if I was just running on the fumes of a former will, waiting for the moment that those fumes ran out and I'd simply stop dead in my tracks. At that point I wouldn't even have minded much if that happened, if not for the absolute certainty that it was exactly what my mom would NOT have wanted to happen. My mom, my best friend and closest family member, ever and always, was gone, and my brother was not only not able to help me but he was beyond my help as well. I just couldn't seem to get any life traction; nothing that was left seemed to matter to me a great deal. I hated my job, my remaining family was as supportive as they could be but most of them were separated by geography and all of them were simply going on with their lives, as they should have done.

In the four and a half years since my mom died (and the three since my brother passed), it's been a terrible, yet essential, struggle for me to define who I am, apart from someone's son or brother. I continue to feel "out of it" and not just how that phrase is typically understood. It is a constant challenge to find a place for myself in the world, to form attachments that will define me, but more importantly to be able to define myself without attachments. I'm not even sure that's possible; we all are part of the human community and seek out and need that type of psychological reinforcement. But when you suddenly, or at least gradually, find yourself without those attachments, what's the alternative? Well, I suppose I should ask "what's the alternative if you want to survive?". If you don't want to, the alternative is obvious.

I suppose there's another obvious alternative, which falls under the "easier said than done" category. One can try to create a new family, surround themselves with people they care about and that care about them, and hopefully reinstill the feeling of belonging and purpose they once did. This is an option, but the problem with it is that people are not like a snake's tail; you just can't "grow a new one" once they are lost.

I guess I'm still not sure who I am without my immediate family. I still feel very relieved when holidays are over, I still have the type of existential hollowness that more than likely won't ever be filled again, and I still curse myself for envying everyone who's family is alive, well, and close by.

But perhaps I'm being a little short sighted. While it's true that nothing can replace the family I've lost, that that particular feeling of belonging and personal identity is gone forever, maybe their memories and the way they still reside (at least) inside me is a way to feel part of something larger. While they aren't here beside me physically, the affect they've had on me, the way loved ones influence us and change us and define us, really can never die. Maybe that simple yet profound feeling of connection is, in and of itself, a way to never really be alone. The way my father could organize people, and figure out solutions, the way my mother could make them feel special and at home, these are qualities that define me; they are inside me, now, never to be discarded or forgotten.

And maybe if I'm fortunate enough, utilizing these same qualities will help put me in contact with others and help with a sense of physical belonging as well. In this way, I won't have to rely on my job or my house or the answers to internet questionnaires to define me; I can say "Who am I? I'm my father's and mother's son, I'm my brother's brother, and their lives live on through me."

Maybe when you're trying to define yourself, ultimately it doesn't matter much how many people are standing beside you; maybe it's more important how many reside within you.