Am I just the sum of all the people that were and are in my life?

I remember it was a Wednesday. I was walking along my university’s garden towards my 10 am class when I came across this tweet:
It’s just 10 in the morning and the world was already attacking me. Those kinds of hard-hitting questions are reserved for midnights in bed when you’re ready to remember all the bad decisions that you’ve made for the past 10 years. I continued walking to class thinking of the countless times that I wanted to pull my hair off for remembering the fact that my love for film is all thanks to a person from the past who gave me a hard drive full of copies of movies that he loved. I remembered how I wouldn’t have been a photographer if I hadn’t been friends with co-photographers. I remembered the countless times that I questioned my authenticity. Am I just me or am I posing as all the interesting people that I met in my 20 years of existence? Do I really love film? Do I really like Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood For Love or do I like it because a lot of my film friends like it? Am I just a projection of all the cool people that I met and want to emulate?
I have always been bothered by this idea that I am the sum of all the person that is surrounding me or had surrounded me in the past. I want to claim all my quirks, interests, values, beliefs as authentic — something that is totally mine. I want to think of myself as my own creation, born from my own hard work. I am a carpenter and every nail, every screw, every woodwork that consists who I am was put in place using my own sweat, blood, and tears.
When people ask me how I became a photographer, I will always tell them that it’s because I’ve always loved the visual arts and the only thing that was missing was some concrete object that will help materialize my love for it — which turned out to be a camera. Looking back, maybe I became a photographer because one of my closest friends in college was a photographer and she was the one who made me see the beauty of photography. I am passionate for all the things that I am passionate about because of all the people and the events that were in my life — that much is true. I will make scenarios in my head where I will not study in the university that I am studying in and will not meet all the people that I have met and I will always shudder at the thought. Would I have been a photographer if I had not met that friend? Would I have been writing about this right now if I have not had all the past experiences that I had?
There is this concept in philosophy by Doctor Ramon Reyes, philosophy professor, called “historicity” where man is considered as a historical being — “pagsusumasakasaysayan” in the Filipino language.It will take days of classes to discuss the concept of the historicity of man but in a nutshell, it states that we are “crosspoints” of many physical, social, historical, interpersonal, and existential events in the past. In this crisis of mine, it is important to understand what it means to be an interpersonal crosspoint. This concept asserts everything that I have been denying all this time — that I am the sum of all the people in my life. My personality is the sum of all the personalities of the members of my family, friends, colleagues, etc. I may have “copied” them or have made steps or actions to not be like them but I am me because of them whether I like it or not, whether they were a pleasant experience or not. I did not choose it but I became it.
Even with the interpersonal historicity concept introduced, don’t you think that there is still a way wherein we will emerge authentic and not just a copy of another person who happens to also be a copy of another person? Well, our historicity is also, in a way, the source of our individuality. We are all unique and authentic historical crosspoints. There is no other person in the entire universe with the same set of histories as I do. I may have loved film because of that guy who introduced me to the genius of the art but he will never be me and I him. Furthermore, I am in full control of who I will be in the future because I can choose the individuals who I will allow into my life.
I may be a sum of all the people in my life but I am an authentic sum.
