When I was a young girl, I use to fantasize that I had been born into the wrong family. What would it have been like to be born into a wealthy family or better yet, one that wasn’t religious? I remember lying on my bed in the room placed in the far corner of the house, as disconnected as was possible. I am unsure what prompted these daydreams. I don’t think I was the only child in the world that ever daydreamed of such things. As I became more independent, my fantasies broadened by mysticism; I started to bide my time with what possible past lives I may have lived. It seems in my search to find out who I was, and to sort out my fate, I was chasing my own tail.
Tonight, while I lie awake next to my fiance’, I turned over in my head Decartes’ statement: “Cogito ergo sum.” I think, therefore I am; I am thinking therefore I exist. I fumbled over the thought that much of what makes us who we are, is learned behavior and extremely subjective. We are in a constant state of observation from our infancy, looking for what to do and how to act. We may be presumed to continue this past our infancy, always scrambling to identify ourselves with something and sometimes, someone. This having been said, it may be presumed that an infant child does not actually think independently, having nothing to think upon, thus, this child does not yet exist though it is irrefutably alive. This can only be legitimized by the cases of feral children which indicate that if a child is not stimulated, especially at the first crucial stages, it’s ability to function, understand or communicate are substantially inhibited if not impossible. I.E. if they are not trained, they remain quite like an untrained animal: wild.
What if the roles we play are not real? What if we type-cast ourselves? What if we stopped doing that?
