my first non-story

So some wise guy once said, to write well you should write everything you know, or something along those lines.
This is what I know.
I think I'll start with what I think i know best. Myself.
I'm 18, just turned. I live somewhere where everyone knows everyone, or think they do.
I'm a senior in high school. I got accepted early decision into a respectable institution of higher education. I should be thankful.
I'm not saying I'm not though, here's the thing, have you ever got the feeling that your life is governed by everything around you, to the point where you don't know if who you are is really who you are, or a result of everyone else's expectations. 1

I get that feeling all the time. 2

All that crap about being yourself and not caring what people think, how am i supposed to know who I am If i keep getting all this "guidance" about who I'm supposed to be, who I could be. Isn't the point of being yourself being someone new, special, unique? Then how come every time I try to be someone special, I get a thousand definitions of what special looks like. I had no idea being special was so ubiquitous. Oh yeah, turns out, you could be a special lawyer or a special doctor. Hell, you could even be a special architect. 3

So here's what I did. I went on-line and I googled "who i am". It came up with a few decent results. Someone said it was a lot of hard work and then there was something about late night snacking and an epiphany. Oh and one girl wrote that one day she just found out who she was and wrote like five pages about herself. That was a bit vain, I thought. Not too far-fetched for me though, I am pretty vain, I mean my first story is about myself, that's pretty vain. Back to the story. So most results were questions and parts of answers. People only knew some things about themselves. Could it be that you never really know yourself to the full extent, could you know another person more than you know yourself? No one knew. 4

How about you? Do you think you know who you are? Do you really want to? For some reason we're obsessed with the notion that If we know who we are everything else will fall in place. We will be content and comfortable all the time. People go on self-discovery trips, they invest in self-assessment quizzes, horoscopes and all sorts of other know-who-you-are quests. What do we expect to find? 5

As you probably can tell by now, I'm very invested in this myself and I tend to bring all my arguments down to one thing. I always try to relate what people are feeling with their ego. This one wasn't much different.It was quite easy to see the connection.6

Ego drives you to ask questions about yourself because as much as you know you're going to find something you won't like, you know you're also going to find something that you do like, which more than makes up for the whole experience. People know they're not perfect, however, they also know that they're good people. They know that every person has a set of bad qualities, but they also know that the redeeming ones make up for those, and they spend their whole lives trying to figure those redeeming qualities out because without them, they are unbalanced, the bad outweighs the good, and people, well people simply can't have that be.7

Deep down we know we're not perfect, but it's our imperfections that balance out the positives making us better than perfect. They make us real. They make us whole. They make us proud to be imperfect, because no one else is like us, no one else is that one in a trillion combination of good and bad. It's a simple equation, but one that not a great many seem to get, not that I do, God forbid, I still crave other people's traits, be it external or internal, and I don't see that ever changing, I guess it's part of who I am.8

So what am I saying? I guess what I'm saying is that wanting to know yourself, who you are, is a little egotistical, a little self-centered. But what is the alternative. It's actually very simple. You just live. Like you wake up and do the things you do everyday, you don't sit around and think why did I do that, why did I say that. Does that make any sense? Think about it this way.9

You are not who you were ten years ago, you're not who you were ten days ago, ten minutes and you won't be the same person ten seconds from now when you finish reading this. Not only do you change psychologically, internally and mentally you even change physically. Every molecule in your body changes constantly.Your own body doesn't physically stay the same for ten minutes.You are part of a changing and continuously dynamic universe. Emphasis on the part part. 10

Would you look at that, a little epiphany hidden between my lines of pointless babbling. Had I known this would happen I would've attempted to write this a long time ago. Maybe before I spent my hard-earned cash an overpriced computer so I could assimilate myself. Well at least I didn't get a tattoo, that would've been hard to get over. I guess I should get to the epiphany part.11

To know who I am implies that I am special, a separate, unique entity. Which I am, to an extent, but not how I initially had thought. I am special because of all the things that have happened only to me, because of all the experiences that have shaped my little details. However,  since everyone else is also uniquely shaped by their own experiences, on that level I am not special, not even a little, not even at all. ( Is that plagiarism? I hope not..just in case, I do not own that last phrase and I didn't make it up). I am part of a universe of events and repercussions. A universe so big that It would be impossible,-no- pointless to try to figure out who I am and why I am the way I am.12

So I'm a bit disappointed now. I just researched my epiphany and I found a book from 1966 by Alan Watts all about it. As disappointed as I am, I am also relieved my psycho babble wasn't completely pointless. That's why I decided to post it, today, as I prepare for my calculus midterm, as I think about what I'll major in when I get to college, I find myself going back to thinking about my identity and how special I am.  I don't think I'll ever be completely free of these thoughts, if I ever do, I'll be sure to let you know.13