Who is Colonel Sanders?
The other day I was flipping channels, and I came across one of my commercials. Seeing myself, I had a startling realization: that’s not me. Who is that Colonel Sanders? I don’t recognize him at all. I went to the mirror and stared at myself, as if in doing so I could reconcile my past selves with the current one. As if by staring hard enough, I could wake myself from this horrible nightmare. It didn’t happen.
I tried to forget it, but the thought lingered and nagged at me. Even when I was making fried chicken. You see, usually when I make fried chicken, I can take my mind off anything, and I can find myself re-centered. But this seemed to be far too big of a problem to shake. So I was left to wonder, when did I become this person? When did I cease being the Colonel I saw in old photographs? I would think back to things I had done and said and wonder who it was that had said and done those things. He felt like a stranger to me. Was I that person?
Obviously, this is not unique to me. We have all seen one of our advertisements and thought, “Who is that Colonel?” at one time or another. What are the conditions that allow for this?
Social media has changed the way we interact with and perceive and perform our identities. I know this is a profound and shocking idea, one you have probably not heard before. Not a lot of thought or writings have gone into this subject, and it’s strange to hear, I know, but it’s true. Perhaps the way we interact on these platforms is responsible for my identity crisis. Can I not reconcile the me on Twitter — the one who feels like he is tightly controlled by an entire team of people — with the me who was unafraid to stare death in the face, resurrecting from my resting place like some great pharaoh? Are these even the same people? I have memories of both, but they somehow feel incongruous.
This brings me to the next logical leap, though: simply aging and maturing and growing as a person could be responsible. It seems healthy to change as we grow. Anyone who was once 16 can look back at who they were then and wonder what was going through that person’s head. What kind of lunatic could be so cruel? What was going through my head when I stole my parents’ car and raced it? It seems impossible that person was me, yet I know it was. Is that all this is? Is it that simple? My 126-year-old self is different from my 125-year-old self? That one-year difference, brought to light by seeing a Colonel I don’t recognize in one of my commercials, feels exactly like not really remembering or understanding the actions of my teenage self but knowing that I was once that person.
There is another famous, well-respected psychological theory out there: that within each of us there are multiple Colonels. They rise to the surface of our consciousness and control it. Some believe the different Colonels appear at random. Others believe that external factors are responsible for this identity shift. Perhaps this explains why when I hear myself say, “Howdy, folks,” I genuinely think he is greeting me, instead of realizing that it is a recording of me saying it.
At the end of the day, perhaps, the root of my shifting identity may not help me solve this common problem, which may make having written this a futile exercise. A navel-gazing think piece that will help no one, not even me. But in this moment of despair, when I feel I have completely lost myself, I realize that no one is ever found. We are all merely Colonels trying to make our way in this world and do our best, and sometimes that can feel weird and foreign, and that’s okay. It’s all part of the Colonel journey.
Colonel Sanders debuts his new Snapchat Lens on Saturday, August 27.