Who are you? (Who, who, who, who?)

Aside from being a great song by the Who, this is a question I’ve had to answer a lot recently. Having just moved into college, I’ve had to learn one of many things so far: how to answer this question.

It shouldn’t necessarily be a difficult question. I mean, it’s a simple ask-and-answer, but is it? I mean, what are you really asking when you ask someone this? How much do you want to know? Do you want to know where I’m from? Where do I go to school? What’s my major? What kind of music do I listen to?

Well, those are easy questions with easy answers. I’m from New Jersey, I attend George Washington University as an International Affairs Major, and I listen to mostly classic rock music (that’s my script for when someone asks).

But you would have just asked those questions if that’s what you wanted to know.

You asked (or I asked for you) “Who are you?”

See the difference? I believe that we’re an accumulation of thousands of people all tangled up like a big bowl of spaghetti. The way I see it, your heart is like a museum of all the people you’ve ever come across and all that you’ve loved. That doesn’t make sense now, but it will… at least I hope.

Tabula rasa is a term coined by philosopher John Locke during the Enlightenment era. It was originally thought up to contrast determinism and innate ideas. The direct translation of tabula rasa is “blank slate”, meaning that human beings are born as a blank slate and are shaped by their experiences. This also captures the idea of empiricism (humans gain knowledge through sensory experience). You can’t know what it’s like to be in a burning building until you’ve been in a burning building. You can’t know what it’s like to be someone else because you’ve never been anyone else.

Everyone I’ve met over the past month has been faced with the same challenge of either choosing to be themselves or having a total self-reinvention. No one would know the difference, so why not? Well, I think that no matter what, who you are, your experiences, and how they shaped you, will show. It’s the way you talk, the way you carry yourself, if you take your earbuds out when you talk to someone, if you smile at someone you pass on the street, how you react when you trip up the stairs (my mom would say that only happens to me, but I know you’ve all done it). You can pretend all you want to be someone else, but little things like that will always show who you are.

So are we ever really a blank slate? If who we are always shows, then are we ever really “starting over”, or free from our past? In short, no, you’re not. In this interpretation of tabula rasa, you’ll never be a blank slate to yourself. You’ve been writing all over that slate since the moment you took your first breath, and you’ll be writing on it up to the moment you take your last. You’ll be gathering experiences and stories and traits your whole life. But other people… that’s where tabula rasa comes in.

Having to answer the “Who are you?” question so many times in the past month made me question it myself. I had a lot of time to think about who I think I am, and who other people think I am. The truth is that you all don’t know me like I know me, and you never will. I’m a different person in my head than I am in yours; one could take that to be very lonesome in that no one will ever know you, or one could see the beauty in that every person you meet, you’re a new person.

While your experiences show a little bit of how you perceive yourself, anyone you meet is going to decide who you are for themselves. But isn’t that kind of awesome? You embody tabula rasa, the literal meaning of it at least, every time you meet someone. They have no idea who you are, and then BOOM, there’s a whole new version of you that exists in someone else’s head. My best friend perceives me in a different way than I do, so does my mother, my father, my sister, my teachers, my friends, my grandma, and look at how many different versions of me there are now. And all of them are valid. They’re all me, they just live in someone else’s world.

Do you see? Bowl of spaghetti, museum of all you’ve ever come across. All the versions are tangled up to create a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts.

To answer the question truthfully, I can’t answer “Who are you?” with much integrity. I think I have a primitive idea of who I am, but I haven’t written enough on my slate to know for sure. I have core values, I have strong opinions and you will hear about them when prompted (or unprompted… I’m working on it), but I don’t think I’ve lived enough life to answer with much confidence. I think few people my age are really able to, we haven’t been able to separate the way that others perceive us (bowl of spaghetti, museum of all you’ve ever come across) from how we perceive ourselves (which is the important part).

Really, the bowl of spaghetti is none of our business. Realistically, people aren’t always going to perceive you in a good way or the way that you want them to. And that’s something that I’ve definitely struggled with for a lot of my life, something that, I’ll admit, still irks me in the back of my head daily. I mean, I’m only writing this now because I’m awake at 3 in the morning on a Monday (now Tuesday) thinking about how someone perceives me. I’m working on it, and we all are.

So who am I?

I’m a thinker, a learner, a feeler in the most intense ways. I love to love and I love to be loved, even if it’s challenging sometimes. I can’t tell you exactly who I am, but I can give you some ideas, and maybe this will help me figure out who I am too.

But to you, I am what you decide me to be

and that is none of my business.

Peace and love,

Maddie

P.S. I do this a lot; I’ll ramble on about the most simple things, making them more complicated than they need to be, thinking and building, just to boil it down back to a simple conclusion. Most of the time my answer is “I don’t know.”