"Who Am I?"

André Breton began with the same question; and so do I: yet not quite equal to the manner in which he described it. He wrote that it is the places which and people whom we haunt that define at least a degree of the apparition that is ourselves. Might I add here, it also includes the shadows we choose to see of ourselves that become who we are. Shadows soon evolve into a reality. - For often they are fragmented dreams of who we desire to be.

Thus I try to find out who I can be by moving out of the country I've lived in for the past decade to a new one. I'm going to spend my twentieth birthday alone, without my friends or immediate family at hand. I've never understood the value of physical proximity until now, but of course, it can certainly be independent of establishing emotional bonds. Albeit I positively agree that having my mother cook me my favorite birthday meal would be the greatest thing on earth right now. Be that as it may, it is true that I have - in part - craved making sacrifices like these in order to discover ways in which I will no longer delimit myself unconsciously. Here at England, I'm becoming somebody else: an identity intertextured closely, yet at the same time alienated against, the person I've always been.

I have seemingly been a rude shock to my extended family back home, owing to the abrupt boldness of my decision to pursue my undergraduate year at Durham. I've always lived an exceedingly sheltered life, like one interred. Many claimed that they were worried on my account, since I wasn't always exactly the most worldly or well-travelled person. They said I was too bookish, too withdrawn; reticent. Outward society would tear me to shreds. My parents' "overprotectiveness" for their only daughter would stunt my growth. Henceforward, I completed one year at a local institution (much to the satisfaction of everyone around me) and believed things to be going well, at least as far as they were meant to.

Until they weren't.

A justification I've repeated to everyone I was leaving behind comes to mind: I've always loved the life I lived back home, but not the well-worn grooves they had formed over everything I held dear. A friend of mine advised that perhaps all I needed was a change of scene: to retreat, and then to return. My father jokingly told me this afternoon that I was not made to live very long in my country in the first place. All that aside, it was not purely out of blatant rebellion that I packed my bags to start university elsewhere, or some imagined distaste toward my nation. It was self-dissatisfaction. In retrospect, my unhappiness of the preceding year still appears to be transfigured into several things at once; several collusions with no fixed idea. Excepting my inherent dissatisfaction with the person I used to be there.

But I still feel like myself. More than I ever have in a long time, regardless of how I'm like a fish out of water at present. For all the immense amount of money, time and effort I've spent in getting here, starting over seems just about right.

I do find it tedious that thinkers throughout the ages never appear to have found an answer to the conflicted chasm of what a person's identity is. Its essence is always amorphous, dissolute, insensible of coherence. I suppose it's this very problem that makes the journey on the whole more interesting.

Though what the object of that journey can be, it remains up to the one who's taking it.

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