Fan Mail!

No, not mine. This is actually a response I'm posting to Coyote Rosebud's latest article (Amateur Cartography) for my friend's magazine.

Coyote:

Liked your piece, but here's a thought for you: is it possible to lose something you never had? I'm stealing this from Rilke:

"...ask yourself...whether you have truly lost God. Isn't it much truer to say that you have never yet possessed him? ...Do you suppose that someone who really has him could lose him like a little stone? But if you realize that he did not exist in your childhood, and did not exist previously...what justifies you, then...in missing him like someone who has passed away and is searching for him as though he were lost?"

Obviously, he's talking about God and faith, but I don't see much problem with replacing God with the self. Maybe that's the only God left to us today, the only God there ever really was, but that's a whole other story.

I think the biggest problem is that people don't know who they are to begin with. And that's not a bad thing. You should never reach an end point; you should never be able to stop and say, "This is who I am and always will be." Life is a journey; it is a process of becoming that only stops when you die.

People think they've "lost themselves" when they find themselves out of their element, cast adrift in a new city, waking one morning to discover they have no idea who this stranger is living their life. The reality is they never knew who they were, and now, because they're all alone with their thoughts, this absence of self-knowledge is apparent. And it's only when people are alone like this that they can actually start asking the right questions. That's why people "find themselves" in Europe; like the comment in Before Sunrise, when you're stuck in an area where you can't understand anyone or anything around you, you're left with nothing but your own thoughts. And that's terrifying, because there are no conventions to guide you. But then, there are also none to constrain you. You can be whoever you want to be, whoever you honestly feel you are. You can like Winnie-the-Pooh and punk rock, you can wear docks and a dress, you can be idealistic and realistic all at once and tell the everyone who doesn't like it to fuck off.

And if you're honest enough with yourself as you begin this process, maybe somewhere along the way you'll find that you've lived yourself into the beginnings of the answers to your questions; that finding yourself is more a process of figuring out who you are becoming than it is finding some mysterious, pre-fabricated "you" knocking around in your head somewhere.