I think I fear being one-dimensional. That people will see me and only think X and not A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, and some alpha and beta as well (is gamma the third greek letter?). I worry that as a public figure, either other people will stuff me into a tight-fitting box or I’ll do it to myself. That I won’t be able to adapt to my surroundings, that I’ll forever be known as X.
Perhaps this is just how it is. I think about Helen Keller and how I read she did a lot of activism work in her later years, and how she seems to be remembered just for being deaf and blind—or was it deaf and mute? I’m not sure.
Perhaps this goes to show that people may not even remember us that much at all. Maybe that’s even more scary—that we spend our whole lives doing only one thing, and then we still can’t even be remembered for that.
Maybe that’s just the essence of human life: we remember few details, if we remember them at all.
I think about the public figures that I know of and honestly, I only know of them for specific things—their most famous songs, movies, speeches, topics, books, etc. I don’t know their full humanity, and even if I did, I still would probably remember them as “the person that did a lot of things but mostly did X.”
Perhaps I struggle because I think that I have to come up with the X for which I’ll be known, but I don’t think that’s the case. Maybe it’s more of the situation where other people decide that part of my identity. Even if I commit to doing X my whole life, people may say, “Oh, he’s the guy that does Y.” Noooo! I remember fighting this in Oakland, California. I was doing a little bit of web development to help pay the bills and I wanted to shift to focus on emotional communication—either iFeelio or Emotional Self-Defense. I remember how frustrated I would feel when people would introduce me as the guy “who knows a lot about computers.” Ugh, no, please no.
This is one area that frustrates me often: thinking that I am the only one who can control my identity. I think it’s always a balance of how I self-identify and how others identify me. One time while riding the daladala in Tanzania (little minibus), someone referred to me as a girl. I remember feeling angry and frustrated, and yet, I did have shoulder-length blond curly hair at the time. Perhaps he saw the hair and guessed from there.
As I said before, maybe I fear having to figure out what’s my X label, when I don’t actually have to do that. Maybe society will figure it out for me, change it, keep it, and overall has more control over it than I do. In a way, I feel free thinking that.
