I Love Not Knowing Who I Am

Finding out keeps me busy

©CHBD via Canva

I hate marketing myself.

There, I’ve said it.

I hate trying to answer such hospitable questions as: “What do you write about?” “Where do you fit?” “What’s your lane?” And I hate hating. (Who doesn’t?) The obligation to introduce myself plunges me into a funk – ask Jane. Why do I have to be “somebody”? Why can’t I just be!

It’s three a.m. I’m awake in a hired room. Jane’s asleep, which heartens. The healthy sleep of a Beloved warms us with hope. We imagine them healing, strengthening, abler to cope with dawn.

I’m quieting myself after last night’s function, which I spell funk-shun, with a rueful grin. Everything about it was nice – very – the occasion, guests, viands. To have been invited was a compliment, even an accolade. I behaved myself creditably, I think, formed connections who might prove helpful. I should be grateful, am grateful. Yet here I am in the solitudinous dark, recovering from the funk I’d hoped to shun.

Please explain.

I open my book to see if I can find myself in its empty pages. “I write myself to right myself,” I’ve sing-song’d for decades. My awkwardness at such funk-shuns arises from ignorance of answers. I don’t know what I write about, not really, or where I fit, or my lane. This is not aw-shucks modesty, which I loathe, or reluctance to admit. I truly have no idea. I know who I’ve been – sort of; from what I’ve written can track my evolution. But who I am now? My fumbling for a reply feels evasive, as if I were a culprit who’s been caught red-handed; inept, at any rate. What kind of bozo doesn’t know who he is! And he calls himself a writer!

The empty page, like the hush of a confessional, invites me to expatiate. I coax myself as one might convince a wary pet. Self-therapy, call it. Tell me, Carlino, what’s on your mind.

During my career years I wasn’t so skittish. I’d wake, don the armor of my purpose, and venture forth to whack dragons. I became who I was supposed to be, whom my interlocutors expected. Business reduces its participants to their function. I had a job to do and I did it best I could. Any true feelings were beside the point, perhaps counterproductive.

These days, free of functionality, true feelings are my stock and trade. I’ve no idea who I’m supposed to be. I’ve no act, script, plan, I just am. Yet to assert that to a stranger sounds boastful – or dismissive. An amiable question deserves an amiable answer! Yet any confident answer would be false. I’ve no idea who I am – that’s my truth. I write to discover, curious to find out.

This curiosity is scientific, not solipsistic. I’m my own lab rat. I believe I’m typical of our species: what’s true for me might be for you more or less, so our investigation might amuse. My taste in literature runs to authors searching for themselves, not to those who already know. Shakespeare’s genius is his characters’ incomprehension: Hamlet’s, Lear’s, Prospero’s defective self-awareness reflects their maker’s – and ours.

To define oneself is to deaden oneself, pin oneself like a butterfly to a board, jail oneself in quote marks, make oneself more mannequin, less human. To live is to learn. To be sure – of anything – is to quit looking. Certainty is a redoubt from doubt.

I love not knowing who I am because it keeps me busy finding out. Smiles daughter Becca, who’s loving and wise: “You’ve spent your life looking for yourself, Dad, and you’re halfway there.”