Asking myself: Who … are … you?

For the first time ever, I’m asking myself a very unique blank slate kind of question: “Who are you exactly?” I woke up late this afternoon just as the sun was setting as I normally do now that my life is on VST – Vampire Standard Time, and my Fiverrr inbox had a message waiting from the designer helping me launch this website and she said: “Concerning the About Us and Blog Page, I will need content for it. Also, I’d like to take a look at your previous blog.”

Her asking to see my previous blog sent a shudder down my spine. My mind, as it usually does, did a callback to a Weird Al Yankovic song – changing the lyrics as it did so and I my ‘thought-response’ to her was “I’d rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my Tongue, than share my previous blog with you.” Or anyone for that matter.

See, the reason I created beneathherwords.com is that I’ve been writing for someone else’s blog for the past eleven years, a website that had her name in the url and it never felt like my own – it felt exactly like living in the house I rented from August to November – like I was renting space but someone else owned it.

But its one thing to dream of having a home for myself, its another thing entirely of actually having to sit down and write for it. Since I woke up this morning and I couldn’t get this guitar riff out of my head from The Who that goes “Whooooo are you? Who-who? Who-who? It’s usually just a catchy song, but today, staring at a blank screen on a new website, it feels like an interrogation.

The Red Pill in Wonderland

It’s a strange thing, being asked the most fundamental question in the world “who are you?” … its even stranger sitting here asking it of myself. Even at 46 years old, I don’t know who I am because I’ve never been able to choose.

In high school, my dad wanted me to be the first in the family to attend university, “go study something useful like law” he said. I can tell you right now that even if the Universe had gifted me a brain smart enough to study law I would have dropped it faster than a fat kid drops broccoli. Unfortunately, I seemingly was last in line the day they handed out brains and I was given one from the “do not use, even in an emergency” pile. I know life is a simulation because I have no doubt some entity said “hmm, let’s give her this mentally divergent brain and see what happens – it’ll be a hoot” and my first ‘hoot’ was not being able to focus for more than a minute or two in school – turning to writing poetry and asking Sun Tzu-like questions … if Sun Tzu had written The Art of Understanding the Universe instead of The Art of War.” No, by the time high school ended my only choice was to attend cooking college and learn to be a chef or go work on an assembly line in a factory. I chose food. I chose – poorly.

I mean, I was great at cooking, working with my hands was definitely my strong suit, dare I say that some of you might agree that my hands are very talented? Ahem. *- insert shy cough. But I didn’t choose cooking, it chose me because back then – that’s what girls studied. Anyways, there was no money in it, only long hours and me living in a 2m x 4m ‘Harry-Potter-room-under-the-stair’ type box that came with such meager earnings.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

So, the culinary arts were a bust – well financially. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t meant to follow recipes; I was meant to write them. But life, being the funny simulation that it is, didn’t hand me a pen. It handed me a costume trunk.

For the next twelve years, I didn’t really ‘live’ … I performed. I became sort of a method actor in a movie that never yelled ‘Cut!’ I played the role of the confident leader, the stern authority figure, the one who had all the answers, and no I don’t mean teacher or cop though I did play both on many occasions. In fact, I played the part so well that I convinced everyone around me that was who I was. I even convinced myself for a while.

But here is the dangerous thing about method acting: if you never break character, you eventually forget who is underneath the makeup. You forget the girl who carries the notebooks. You forget the girl who just wants to sit in silence and listen to the wind.

And that is exactly where I was when I had my life packed up for me … which is a nice way of saying I had a complete mental breakdown that the readers of my other blog – it that shall not be named – are very familiar with from me writing about it many times daily over the past two years … and now I live way up here 35km north of Chiang Rai in total seclusion. Oh sure, I was a successful character, but a lost human.

“The self is just a story the brain tells itself to stay sane.”

— Adapted from Peter Watts, Blindsight

Which brings me back to the Caterpillar. That smoke-filled question: ‘Who… are… you?’ When you spend a lifetime wearing masks, taking that first breath of fresh air without one is terrifying. This is my Neo moment (I’m much cuter than Keanu). I’ve swallowed the Red Pill, I’ve moved to my house built literally in the middle of nowhere, and I’m seeing the real world for the first time.”

I’m a … writer?

And it’s scary … this world that is staring back at me. I’ve been urged by thousands of my readers to write, told they’d be the first to buy my books if I ever publish them. I’ve written a thousand blog posts and yet, I’ve written none. Well, none that I think are worthy enough to fit the expected writing quality of being in a book would seemingly demand. Yet, here I am, a 46 year old girl who can’t be that quasi method actress I’ve been for the past eleven years as it broke me and regardless of that, I’m a stone’s throw from being 50 and if I haven’t found myself by then, then when?

Nah, I’m in. I’m all in.

I want to know who I am – for the first time in my life, I want to know who I really am. I’ve never been outside of Thailand. I’ve never woken up beside a man and known what it’s like to be truly happy. I’ve never looked at a man and been totally vulnerable. I wish there was a man who I feel like was put on this earth just for me, who could rescue me from the depths of hell.

I do know about loss though. Robin Williams (god speed Robin, I love you) says in the movie clip above “you don’t know about loss because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself” – only – the way my brain is wired, it wants to love everyone more than myself, and its why I’m so sad all the time because its not possible to love everyone, fix everyone and make everyone happy. It’s what I’ve been trying to fix for the past two years since my breakdown.

And I think, or rather, I hope – my most sincerest hope, is that by writing for beneathherwords, in whatever it is I’m going to write about … that I won’t just eke out a living doing so, but that maybe, just maybe – I’ll find out, finally, who I am. And maybe then, I’ll have fixed myself enough that I can experience all those things that Robin talked about to his patient.

W.Beneath