Who am I?

I’ve been trying to answer the question lately of “what do I want” in life. What are my desires? I have some things that sound cool. Like having a house and a big group of friends and a girl who I love and loves me. But then when I get into how my life looks in the day-to-day, it gets kind of fuzzy. Like, what am I doing with my time? How does it make me happy? What makes me happy?

Pretty soon, to answer one set of questions, I need to go deeper. What makes me happy? Well, I don’t know. Why don’t I know? Can it change? Can I change? What about me can change? What makes me, be “me”. Pretty soon, I start thinking about who am I even? And that gets pretty hard to define.

What makes a person? Like Tyler Durden said in fight club, “You’re not your job. You’re not the car you drive . . . “. We’re not the things we have. What about mentally? We’re not our thoughts. Those can so easily be modified by others. What about our emotions? Same thing. So, like, this bedrock of ideas that I had about who I was. It’s kind of gone. What am I? The process and method by which I change? Can even that be modified? When I look at the “invariants” of what I am, I’m left with a very small and nebulous list. Can we choose to be almost anyone? When we break ourselves down, what is truly unchangeable about ourselves?