Yours Truly

Describe yourself. What elements of your description don’t apply to anyone else? Relativized to particular times and places, you surely have attributes and relations no one else does. You’re a node, then, on a four-dimensional map? What have you done that no one else has ever done? These are not rhetorical questions. Now exclude from the list all those doings that aren’t worth hanging your identity on, and what is left?

Many are kind, many are pretty or plain, many have clean hands, quite a few are hungry, all are self-aware: these things do not distinguish you.

We are stuck with the traits, manners, desires and languages that we inherit and absorb as social human beings. Those are what we are. There are also weightings, arrangements, transformations, developments and articulations of these public natures that do indeed mark you as an individual, if you engage them in that spirit, as your project, your need, your fate, your commitment, your decision.

Any number of people can make the same decisions you do, but they cannot make your decisions if you insist on making them yourself. (And this is NOT a ‘grammatical remark’: it is a line in the sand. Who actually makes your decisions is a contingent matter.)

Meaningful selfhood is undertaken, not discovered. It is worked toward. It is aspired to, and feared. It changes. It is energetic and active. It is complex. It is dangerous. At its best, it takes my breath away. It is the shaping I call you.