Who are you, really?
I was reading a book recently about a man who wakes up with amnesia and begins to piece his life back together by figuring out the truth about himself by his reaction to or knowledge of various things. For example, in order to outmanoeuvre the antagonists, he has to instinctively figure out his skills and professional knowledge, and through a series of twists and turns, discover the people he can trust who may help him solve the mystery of his amnesia and thwart the plot of the evildoers out to destroy the world. While the concept may be fiction and the story fun, the idea got me thinking about what it would be like to have to rediscover ourselves after the loss of all memory.
While in the story the protagonist wakes up as a homeless man, he notices by his clean and soft hands that he’s most likely not from the streets. By his ability to outmanoeuvre his trail of tails he figures out that he’s probably be trained in some type of special forces. By his understanding of nuclear physics he realizes he must be a scientist and so on. This got me thinking, what if we woke up one day and couldn’t remember a thing about who we were? How would we begin to piece together our life?
If we were to use the same formula as the story and look at our bodies, clothing, material goods, type of car we drive, clue into what we instinctively know and understand; figure out what we readily like; think about the people who know us and imagine how they might describe bits and pieces about our personal and professional life; rediscover our relationship to our spouse, children, grandchildren, siblings and parents and reassess all the ways they have or have not helped to make us the person we have become, what would we do with all the information? What kind of picture would emerge that would give us some clue as to our identity? Would we like who we are? What would we change simply because it didn’t fit the picture of who we think we really are or should be?
An interesting challenge to say the least, which got me thinking about what an interesting exercise it would be to write down objectively (or at least seriously think about) the imagined conversation with certain people and realistically assess the person others described , deciding which of those characteristics feel right and those that feel inherently wrong? All this would help us start at least imagining the person we really want to be by changing all those things that really need to be changed.
While most people wouldn’t take the time to do this exercise because of busy schedules and so on, at least thinking about losing yourself in yourself gives you a blank slate to work with anytime you want to start creating what you do want. Food for thought.
My heart to yours,
Vonne
