Who are you?

We spend a lot of our lives trying to figure out how we define ourselves, attempting desperately to discover and then create the legacy we want to leave behind. But there are all sorts of contributors to our identities that we forget when we are not necessarily conscious of.

At the gym where I work the front desk staff has to clock the maintenance staff in and out. This has led to many errors in their hours and has resulted in my boss having to recalculate their hours daily. I suggested to my manager that we teach them to perform this function themselves, thus eliminating the errors. He asked me to show them how, and I was in for a bit of a shock. It did not occur to me when I made my suggestion that these employees would not know how to operate a computer, and yet they all struggled with the task. My ignorance was revealed. I would have thought that at least the younger employees would have learned how to type a little bit from chatting or something online…

I never went to fancy private schools or growing up, but I got a good education anyway – I began learning to type when I was in kindergarten, and by the time I graduated college I had learned how to write formal essays with fancy citations and complicated grammar. I spent many hours reading classic literature, learning the history of the world, and even more hours figuring out how to convey my points of view on these subjects via text…

But this all began before I ever asked myself the question “Who am I?” I have never thought of my education as a major defining feature of my identity…and that seems so silly to me now!

I guess it takes events like this to help you realize what you’ve taken for granted. Fair enough, but I am now trying to answer this question: what huge parts of my development have gone completely unnoticed by me? As is the case with many teenagers, I experimented with different styles and tastes, hoping to find something that would help me to understand how I fit into the world around me. In all this searching for my “self” I never looked at the rituals that already existed for information: school, family dinners, summer camp, etc.

So is that what this whole game is about? You search everywhere outside yourself trying to feel whole only to discover all you needed to know was already there? But then again how can you arrive at that moment until you’ve done all the searching?

I always feel pretentious when I start "philosophizing" like this.