Reality Check
I was sitting going through some old pictures when I realized… I have no real idea of who I used to be. I do not fully remember what I used to be like, or how I used to think when I was younger. I have no idea who that girl was. If I met her on the street, her and I would probably have different views on a few different topics. She’s lost to me forever.
No, I’m not having a mid mid life crisis, I’m just trying to say that I or you can’t fully get back into the old “you’s” brain and think the way you used to think. We can never really go back, every moment that happens changes us irrevocably. I guess I just find it weird that not only do we not truly ever know how someone else feels or think, we don’t even really know ourselves.
Too often we go through life thinking that all we need is ourselves. All we need to do is trust in ourselves. All we need to do is believe in ourselves. All we need is to take care of ourselves. This is all complete bullsh*t.
The reality check is we need more than just ourselves. We wouldn’t be alive today without being cared for by other human beings. We’re nothing without other people, we wouldn’t exist without other people and we shouldn’t forget that fact as we grow older into our teens or early twenties. “When an infant falls below the threshold of physical affection needed to stimulate the production of growth hormone and the immune system, his body starts shutting down." - - - we literally would die if we weren’t loved. Maybe you can be conceived in a test tube and in the future from an artificial uterus, but there is no machine that would mimic a human’s love or touch. Isn’t that strangely comforting?
How do you define yourself? If I asked you – who are you? Your response would be???… I am Sarah. Or Jane or whoever – so by your name, right? But who calls you by your name?… other people do. Your own name doesn’t really belong to you does it, it’s just a way for OTHER people to identify you, so it really belongs to them. Its for them to use. You don’t write your name down on a piece of paper so that you know who you are, you write it down because someone else gave you that name and you need to identify yourself to whoever you’re handing the paper in to.
How do you know what you were like as a kid? Because other people told you. So that means that my first few years don’t belong to me – they belong to my family. I don’t remember anything at all about who I used to be when I was 2 years old, or 5 years old for the most part. Knowing that someone else knows something about you that you don’t know is so extremely cool. Hearing that I used to walk before I crawled or that I used to draw squiggly lines over people’s faces in photo albums or when my sister tells me when we’re shopping for groceries during our trip to Singapore that I used to eat those cookies all the time when I was young makes me smile, and I would never have known those facts about my own self if it wasn’t for my family and people around me. It’s that question - “if the tree falls in the woods and there was no one there to hear it does it make a sound?”… If I grew up with no one around to tell me who I used to be would I actually exist? I’m not so sure I would.
It’s odd to me to know that I don’t even know who I used to be. It’s one thing to think that way about yourself as a child because no one has memories from when they’re 1 years old… but what about if you couldn’t remember who you were 3 years ago? What about if you couldn’t remember what you thought like? What if you couldn’t remember what it was like to feel the emotion that you knew you felt at that point of time? What if you couldn’t remember what it was like when you fell in love with someone or something like painting or dancing? How is it that we change so fast?
Is the you that you are now really the same you that you came into the world as? Scientifically even – no. You’re not the same you as you were when you were born, and you’re not even the same you that you were 8 years ago or yesterday. From Stanford’s stem cell bio and regenerative medicine website it states: “Every one of us completely regenerates our own skin every 7 days. A cut heals itself and disappears in a week or two. Every single cell in our skeleton is replaced every 7 years.”
So every single cell in my skeleton has been replaced 3 times now. That is so freaking weird! I think for the most part, I exist because I have family, because they’ve told me initially who I was. I am my father’s daughter, my mother’s daughter, my older sisters youngest sister. Without people who love me in this world I don’t exist. The tree wouldn’t make a sound if it fell.
So to all the people who think they’re all cool and thug life and “You’re born alone you die alone”… reality check. It’s not really true, is it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If_a_tree_falls_in_a_forest
Read that. Super interesting.
