Do you ever take a step back from the reality of day-to-day obligations and just let your mind run amok?  Frankly, I wouldn’t recommend it.  I was in just such a zone of self-indulgent mental prancing the other day, and I thought myself into the worst dilemma.  I began to wonder if everything in my life – what I do, who I am to the rest of society – if it is all an act.  If the people who I surround myself with would run in fear and disgust if they actually knew “the real me.”  If I am something wholly other than what I convince everyone else (and myself) that I am.

It is a world-altering frame of mind to live in.  I don’t like thinking that way.  If I go down the road of identity-questioning, then I eventually reach a point where I question why I even bother pretending to be someone else.  I start to imagine a life where I exist as “the real me.”  Where I drop the act and let my “true” thoughts and “real” instincts rule my entire mode of being.

But the thing is…I can’t imagine that life.  I honestly have no idea what I would look like independently of everyone around me.  Descartes said “I think, therefore I am,” implying his existence relied merely on what goes on in his own head.  I wonder if that’s true, though.

Do we exist independent of other people?  Who are we, without society or community or family of any sort?  If a man cries in a forest and no one is around to hear him, does he make a sound?

Since Descartes initiated the Enlightenment, Western thought has been gradually infiltrated with the idea of “individualism” – that we are individual human beings who do not have to rely on anyone else to survive.  (Individualism, that, I should note, has had enormous positive influence on the world in its link to the concept of individual human rights).

As the Baby Boomers raised it to the next level, though, I think individualism started heading in a dangerous direction.  We began to take for granted our ability to survive without anyone else.  We started to believe in the holy power of “I.”  Family structures became less important, religious communities diminished, and general civic involvement began to fall off at a dramatic pace.

Fundamentalist Christianity, ironically, had been making the same move for even longer – from a communal, global understanding of faith towards the “personal Jesus” that dominates most Christians’ understanding of their faith.  Not to mention the similar move in Extremist Islam that turned a foundationally social religion inwards to the point that some believed it to be simply about lavish rewards in the afterlife.  Religion stopped being about how you treat others, and it started being about how God treats you.

For my part, I have lived most of my life in this myth of individualism.  I have always despised accepting help from other people, and I have long held the mantra that I am an individual who can exist perfectly happy apart from humanity.

And I have been desperately, hopelessly, wrong.

I no longer think we can survive apart from others.  We depend on people for our physical well-being, our emotional wholeness, and, most critically, our identity.

By golly, I think I just found the answer to my original question!  Who am I, apart from society?  Quite simply, it doesn’t matter.

Apart from how you treat others and the world, it does not matter.  Certainly, it may be possible to discern an identity completely unrelated to one’s outward behavior, but I don’t think this identity matters.  I mean, even when I am completely alone, I spend most of that time thinking about other people, reading about them, watching them on TV, generally wondering how to better relate to them.  And as we move through life, don’t we spend immeasurable energy so critically trying to train ourselves to behave better?  From preschool lessons in sharing to teenage lessons in responsibility, to young adult lessons in loving, aren’t we always trying to improve our interaction with others?

The 60s ushered in a good dose of “being who you are and not letting anyone tell you what you can or cannot be.”  And most of that was healthy – it fought civil rights abuses, empowered women, gave LGBT folks the pride that we still struggle to instill in those of all sexual orientations.

Yet, even if you go down the individualistic road, at a certain point, you have to decide what YOU want yourself to be.  You have to decide who you are and who you want to be.  And when you reach that point, when you have completed this exercise…doesn’t the “you” you have created only matter insofar as it is presented to the ones who surround you?

So, I can leave this post with a greater peace of mind than I began.  I am comfortable living in the unknown of identity.  I still don’t know who “I” am, but now that I think about it, didn’t a wise Jewish mystic once say that the key to finding ourselves was to lose ourselves?

I love, therefore I am.