HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE WE?

I am a pretty unflappable person. But I haven’t always been, though I think my family takes that quality for granted – or perhaps they assume I am not paying attention, or just heavily medicated.

But as I reflect upon my ‘outward calm’, it occurs to me that I used to be flappable, and that looking back on me I have actually been a lot of different people, through various stages of life. Perhaps our personal history resembles a psychological clown car, where when we choose to open the doors, a lot of varied, and sometimes unusual, characters tumble out – not all of them people we’d want to take a long bus ride with. As an aside, I knew a man who thought he was a lot of different people, but after a good nights sleep he felt like a new man.

 I don’t look back much as a rule, but painful as it may be, it helps to understand where and who we are by looking back at where and who we was. Were.

I know we learn from our mistakes, and are ultimately shaped and defined by our experiences, and the people we meet. Looking back on my life learnings, there were an awful lot of times when I wore the behavioral dunce cap. And those nights in college – which I deny ever happened – we called the Ohnos, as in Oh no, I did what? But unless a game warden was nearby, most incidents passed without incident. And fortunately for our generation our fashion mistakes were forgettable:  white belts, platform shoes, and leisure suits, which eventually disappeared in polyester fires. I pity young folk – tattoo removal doesn’t seem quite so easy.  

It would be easier to study our past if we had video footage to look back on. I know that every family has old home movies, but most appear as if they were shot through screen doors -ours could have been footage of UFOs or the launch of Sputnik, or even better, that could have been some other family looking truly fine in their leisure suits. We can only hope…              

I guess that’s what cell phones and social media will do for young folk today. Good luck with that. Before long, no one will ever be able to be hired, parents won’t be able to deny the things they did in college, and the Ohnos will be the documented Ohyeses.  And no one will be able to run for office – but can it get any worse? ,this being the first election where neither candidate is mentally fit to serve as President.  

But I may be late to this realization of self-discovery, because this need to understand who we really are and where we came from has fueled the ancestry craze. Or it could just be the need to blame who we are on someone else.

But all this time on the captivity couch has given me an idea: What if the ancestry industry provided you a family history that allowed you to be who you really want to be? If I could pay a $35 ‘upgrade fee’, and my Grandfather who emigrated from Lithuania suddenly became a deposed and exiled Archduke, I would be some sort of royalty. Or if my Mom’s father had owned the Nifty, and not been asked to leave most nights, I would be the descendant of land owning capitalists.

I guess I will have to just be content with who I am. I don’t really have the energy to be anyone else.