Who Am I

Who are we?

Who am I? Who are you?

It's one of the most important questions we can ever ask, right up there with "why" (which is the single most important question, I think) and "how do we know that we really know anything?" The question of who one is... it's a question that seeks to compress the entirety of an individual human experience into... what, exactly? Something that can be answered in a sentence? A page? A book? Something that can be translated into mere language, mere words?

How do you even try to answer that question? Where do you begin? Do you talk about what you do, what you've done, what you hope to do in the future? But then you've not really answered the question, have you? Not the question I'm asking, anyway. You've told me what you've done, what you do, what you will do. You haven't told me who you are.

I can ask the question of you, of myself, of anybody in the world. I can get a thousand answers, a million, a billion, and all of them will answer a variation of "what" instead of "who?"

For the record, I understand the difference between who and whom. I just don't care about it as much as I do other bad habits of speech; "who" just happens to sound better in most cases. So there. Moving on.

I'm a writer. I'm a gamer. I'm a cat owner, an apartment renter. A student, and not a great one at that. I'm a son. A friend. Maybe even a best friend. A brother. Maybe some day I'll be a father. All things that answer the question of what I am. Not who.

I like music and movies. I like books. I like the color purple. I don't like spiders. I like vanilla. I like to think that I'm a romantic. I like feeling witty and clever. I don't like stupid people.

All variations of what. What I am, what I like, what I do, what I want. What, what, what. I can never describe who. Even my name doesn't really answer the question; it might tell you who I am, in the sense of identity, in the sense that you can now distinguish me from the other 6.6 billion people in the world in some small way. But who is Matthew, exactly? My name is something that my parents gave me; it has a meaning, a meaning that might even describe me, if I'm lucky, but it wasn't created for me. There are other people who share the same name, other people who the name describes.

Don't we need to know this question? Don't we need to be able to know who we are? We walk around every day and see our fellow humans, our fellow men and woman, and we see the faces and the masks, and we're all aware, in some small sense, that no one is ever who they truly appear to be. We all have secrets. Thoughts we don't ever, ever share, however small and insignificant. We all have moments we're not proud of, we all have and do things that we think are "out of character" at times. We're not really like that, we say and think later. That's not who we are. Not who I am. That person, that other person, he's not me.

But how can I say that, how can I think that and believe that when I don't even know who I am?