i am

For most of my life, I looked for social connection online. Now as it increasingly becomes the norm, I've adopted a more luddite view that doing so is a fundamentally bad idea. I'm talking relationships of all kinds, friends, acquaintances, romantic partners. Not that there's anything wrong with meeting and engaging with people online, but it's not a substitute for engaging with people physically, materially, chemically.

Even blogging, I'd imagine an audience, imagine that I'm talking to someone. It's an attempt at socializing that all too understandably leaves me feeling less than sated in my basic impulse for human contact. I'd fixate on whether people would be interested or understand my rantings on the nature of the universe and why the meaning life is actually 43, when really, that's a whole lot less important than I'd like to think. 

I used to believe that what goes on in our heads best represents who we are. That sharing long letters explaining everything best encapsulated getting to know each other, but what does this mean when we never really know ourselves? The self being an ever-changing nexus point amidst a vast tangle of ever-changing circumstances, we go down endless rabbit holes trying to sort it all out. 

I want to believe it's who I am, because it feels like taking control of the narrative. I can spend all day explaining myself and giving my thoughts on everything, but I'm not doing anything. I'm not being anything. We are how we behave in the moment, at the whims of so many external factors. I'm tired of being someone forever explaining myself. I don't have any answers. I don't know what the fuck's going on. 

There is a whole lot to who we are that we can't even pretend to control. We might say how others perceive us is not who we are, but who we are is a matter of perspective. Consequences arise from the interaction of all these circumstances. To define ourselves apart from everything else is to create an abstraction, an irrelevant concept in our heads. 

Reality is material. All of these thoughts and feelings are material. The consequences of chemical reactions with environment. Ever more I'm learning this, training with people. Depending on each other, helping each other grow, struggling alongside each other and against each other. It matters that it's all so physical, stimulating chemical reactions without regard for abstractions of who we are. 

What is connection but another chemical reaction? The imperative that I find others like me was pathological. A need to find people that don't make me feel so small. I need to find ways to engage with people who actually exist. I need to get past fears of doing exactly that. Training does that for me to at least some extent. If only I weren't getting sick and injured all the time. What are we when we are nothing to anyone else?

I've realized that who I am doesn't matter. Not in the sense that I thought it did. Not as a concept to be explained, but we matter as the product of our interactions with the world around us. We are what we do with our lives. Try to do better, try to have a positive impact, endlessly entangled in countless reasons we never quite get there.