I am no one.

I was someone, but I sent him away.

Now I’m no one.

Random thoughts and actions without congruity.

I float along; a myriad of pieces of me.

They used to add to something.

Now they’re nothing.

Now I’m lost.

Now I’m undone.

Though perhaps I’m now finally myself.

----

I wrote a few months ago about a conscious decision I was making to tear down some of my walls and shed this calm/rational/unflappable persona I’d worked on over the previous fifteen years. (More on that here.) At the time, I wasn’t aware of the hole it would leave behind. I was naive. I figured, “I’ll take off the mask and radiate my true self!” (Too much?)

Instead, I was left with nothing. It was like what made me, “me”—referring to all the things that added up to my identity: my thoughts, tastes, actions—everything, was held together by this central idea of who I was. The character provided a type of gravity that kept all the pieces of me together and focused.

Then I blew up that central idea, and now all the random bits that had once come together to form “me” are just floating around. No longer tied to anything, they’re scattered randomly. Now I’m less… substantive, like a cloud or a shadow; like how without forces that hold particles together, a table just stops being a table. You could pass your hand right through me.

That’s what I mean when I say I’m no one. Perhaps “nothing” is even more appropriate. I feel less concrete, less stable, less real, less defined, less confined.

It’s absolutely-fucking terrifying, this feeling of transience, of being intangible. But it’s also liberating. And I wonder if it’s the way it’s supposed to be—that I’m not (we’re not) supposed to have an identity. I know that we’re creatures of patterns and categories. We love things in boxes. But I feel like I’m out of my box. And while I don’t like it (it’s extremely discomforting), I think this strange cloud of random “me-elements” is a more honest depiction of who I am. So I think I’ll just float around for a while and see how it feels. I’ll let you worry about how to define me. I’m taking a break.

For the record: I realize there’s some irony in posting this immediately after creating the “John the Writer” persona. That’s just Instagram. There’s more shit going on over here.