Me, Defined

I often find that living in the present is a strange mixture of heady flashes of nostalgia—flashbulb memories and vague senses of déjà vu—and wistful planning of moments yet to come. It is hard to disentangle from the Things That Came Before—the things that made me who I am now—and the Things That Will Come, the things that are predicated on who I am now. It’s like being caught in a time loop, forever oscillating between immutable, unchangeable moments stuck in time like granite monoliths, and wispy, nebulous events that may or may not ever come to pass.

Getting unstuck requires just the right sort of moment, impossible to ignore for what it is: immediate, unmissable, vitalizing. It electrifies the spirit, shocks you out of reverie and speculation. It’s the sort of experience that makes you feel like you’re living in a movie, just for a moment. An ephemeral yet lingering feeling sung about in ear worm EDM songs and made glamorously unreal on reality TV. It doesn’t have to be magical, it may not be transcendental, but it is exciting, invigorating.

It reminds you, in a gleam of clarity, what it means to be human.

Sometimes, these moments occur in rapid succession, dulling the impact slightly every time. When pulled out of memory in the future, the intensity might feel vague or the details fuzzy. Other times, the stretch between moments might be agonizingly long—so long, in fact, that it becomes hard to remember that such moments even exist. But when they finally hit again, it’s like an earthquake in your gut, a tectonic shift upheaving status quo and leaving you trembling with raw emotion.

I sometimes feel like I’m standing in the shadow of my own existence. The triumphs and accomplishments are both mine and simultaneously someone else’s, like my body has gone one way with great success and my mind has fallen a few steps behind and can only watch as the gap between these two self-same people stretches wider and wider. I think sometimes people call this “impostor syndrome,” like when you’re feeling you’re not really as clever as you actually are. Maybe you don’t feel as productive or accomplished or just happy as everyone else around you seems to be, and you question where you belong in this paradigm. But this feeling is not that exactly, either.

It’s dissociation—an ebbing and flowing rift that periodically opens between your inside spirit and your outside visage. It’s going on autopilot and falling behind, until you snap to attention and realize that in your haze your life has outpaced your consciousness, and you’re not quite sure how to leap forward and catch back up with your body.

And then...one of those moments. Like a lightning bolt from an alternate dimension, it crackles and surges with a quasi-divine purpose crashing into you to give you a system reboot, to allow you to take stock and realize that maybe, just maybe, you were falling behind your own life again.

And perhaps the most intriguing part: these moments rarely occur in isolation. Often, they are shared with someone else. Maybe it doesn’t carry the same weight and significance for them—maybe they are not so in need of a system shock and this moment will fade more readily into the fog of an uncountable number of moments that came before. But sometimes, these shared moments carry the same charge for those you share it with, and the mutual significance sears the memory into your mind in pure, crystalline form.

And in these moments, I transcend time and space and feel truly one with myself. I know that this memory will never fade, or die, because there is someone else there, and they too will speak of it. In these moments, I am infinite. In these moments, I am human.

In these moments, I am me.