AoNikki

This morning, I woke up and left my room in a rush. After three days suffering from insomnia, my mind started to work like the distortion function on an electric guitar amplification: I couldn't think really clearly, everything seemed to be somehow convoluted. When having just come back to my room at 3, I realized both of my hands' wrists had been aching. Well, "aching" is not really a precise word. It's the feeling of being numb and the strangeness of carrying mobile, inflexible joints. And I realized my body was sending me signals that I was under some kinds of mental stress, even though I myself didn't feel it mentally.

But why was that?

These recent days, my identity had been continuously questioned. First of all, I had to think of it indirectly through the process of writing personal statements. Now when looking back, everything seemed to be carried out naturally. I sat down, I thought, I chose something that I considered would represent me well, and I wrote. However, although now I don't remember it so well, the mental selection of appropriate topics taking place in my mind at that time was somewhat intense. It was so tiresome that now my memory of it is just a total black out.

I went through that somehow.

And then school rolls back in with TOK presentations coming first; and I soon found myself looking for a TOK topic. After tries and retries, I finally came up with something called perception of self. As abstract as the concept might sound, the main idea of the whole presentation is to look at how people answer the question "Who are you?" As a result, I have spent lots of time strolling around campus, nicely asking people out of the blue: Who are you? And soon enough, one of my interviewee interviewed me back: so who are you?

Who am I? Although I had been asking that question to everyone, I wasn't ready to answer it. "I don't know who I am."

It kept haunting me until now.

Then my state of unsureness about my own identity came back to me during an English class, when we were reading the most famous 12 lines of Macbeth. At the moment, remembering the exact wording appears to be an impossible task for me, but I do remember two things:

Life is a shadow

And

Life is just a tale on the stage, told by an idiot

The idea scared me - it really did. It was the ephemeral feeling when realizing that I would never be seen after my death. No one would again see me as a person, all they would remember, if any, would be just my shadow - my life. My life becomes how I'm defined and reflected. It is a shadow that follows me every single day I'm alive.

And in that shadow, every day, like an idiot, I write my life down - like a play on a stage, seen as entertainment for a large audience who tap their feet and whistle when what must come finally comes.

Just a play. Just a quick spark in the universe. Doesn't matter.

And then, I was told by a total stranger that he was just an outcome of my imagination. I didn't know what she (assuming that the stranger was a "she") meant, I didn't know where she got that thought from. But I realized that it struck me by a deeper level than she might have imagined it would.

Who am I?

I like nicknames, and I have different ones for different major parts of my life - and later on the nickname someone calls me will characterize our relationship and how we influence each other. But I can't pick a name, not any of them, to answer the question. I am not my name.

Who am I? A student. A Vietnamese. A girl. Daughter of my parents. Friend of my friends. Are these what I mean to me? Are these what I mean to the rest of the world?

And he, who is he? A Canadian. An MIT boy. Son of his parents. So? Are these what he means to me, and to the world?

And most important of all, does he really exist? How can he exist when I don't even know who he is?

As a result of the distance, my images of him are mostly due to imagination. Reality, whenever it chooses to come, instantly crashes it. Isn't it surreal? Sometimes. But how do I know if, eventually, he is a tangible concept and not just a shadow that I've happened to catch?

How do I know if my dear roommate, who says "good morning" to me every day, is real? How do I know if she's not another shadow in my head, another product of my vivid imagination?

How do I know if anything else, but me, exists? How do I even know if I myself exist? Maybe I don't. Maybe I'm just a nightmare in the middle of a sleep, and one day I will wake up realizing that none of this, including myself, is real. Maybe I'm just a tool, a fool, or a toy, or a model. Maybe I'm just a concept. Maybe I'm even none of them. I'm nothing at all.

Maybe everything's characteristic is imaginary. How can I justify that?

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I'm supposed to stay productive on campus.

But this is too overwhelming for me. I need time and space to evaluate my existence.

I'm going to sleep, and hopefully after this weekend - with no studying, no internet - I'll get something.