April 9, 2002

• One Long Rambly Mofo Of A ‘Blog
  
  It’s like breathing for me. It’s like if you try to hold your breath, you can’t after a while. Some kind of autonomic system takes over and you inhale. Or like a dog barking at people walking by on the sidewalk; we say, “Bad dog! No bark!” but it’s just instinct for the dog. It’s in their genes.
  
  And so, being distracted, or falling into ritual (neurological, not religious), or feeling the skin-ache that drives me to hyperfocus… these are like breathing to me. I’m born to do them. I’m born to feel them.
  
  They’re me, in as much as anyone’s breathing is them. What can one identify with? Do you identify with your breath, your sweat, your poop? Do you identify with your body? Is it you? Is it not you? What valid arguments are there, either way?
  
  Is it true that because I’m broken in a number of easily-recognizable ways, I’m the sum of those deficits? Those deficits make me who I am, of course, as much as my strengths do. And in fact, some of my ‘deficits’ are actually ‘strengths’ and vice versa, depending.
  
  So the question is: Depending on what? Does one go around pursuing the circumstances in which deficit turns to strength, just so one doesn’t have to call a deficit what it is?
  
  I’m blind in my left eye. I have been since I was 7. I’m 34. Think of the years’-worth of experiences my right visual cortex has never had. Consider that the hemispheres of the brain are specialized; my view of the world is thus specialized. Weighted toward the rational and solid. Literal. I see things and I understand their function and functioning in detail almost immediately. Things I see are associated by linked lists; I see a tree and I see an associative tree of data about it in my mind.
  
  I don’t see love or hate or fear. I had to learn to recognize those things. I’m still learning. This is something people can’t relate to; they say, ‘Everyone has to learn the subtleties…’ But I’m still having trouble with the unsubtle!
  
  It’s like when someone approaches you on the street, and you can’t remember their name. You fish around for clues, like asking about the guy’s wife, so he’ll say her name, and then maybe that’ll jog your memory about his name. Or you ask about work so he’ll say the company’s name, for the same reason. The difference for me is that it’s not just the person’s name I’m guessing, and it’s not that I only have to do it occasionally. Imagine always having to do that, in order to reverse-engineer some understanding of the inner state of whoever you’re dealing with.
  
  This is why I isolate and talk through mediation such as this very ‘blog. My identity, to myself and to others, is dominated by the physics of my body, most notably my neurology. There are rules and borders. To me, the mapping between the borders (neurology, fitness, beauty) and the rules (social- and self-identity, taboos, celebrity) seems horribly arbitrary. The rarity of my exception kills any chance for the exception to change the norm (and that’s how the mechanics of all this works: there’s an identity-norm, and then exceptions stretch and mutate the norm as if it were an ecosystem or organism evolving).
  
  Some folks tell me that I spend too much effort thinking about my physical situation. That I’m something of a hypochondriac, which is a sort of narcissism. The narcissism I’ll cop to, but the body my soul decided to take off the shelf and inhabit is broken in some really quite fascinating ways. I don’t think it’s unhealthy to consider it. And even more fascinating are the ways in which people react to the unusual, and the universal it implies.
  
  All of this applies to everyone, you see. Everyone’s climbing over hurdles. At some point in their life, everyone’s looking at the world as if from the bottom of a well… removed, distant, alien, unreachable. Not that everyone stays there, and not to say that I’ve stayed there. But it’s a place I’m intimately familiar with.
  
  I say stuff like this and people act as if I’m three years old, telling me how beautiful life can be, and how I’ll find what I’m looking for one day. Well, here’s some news for ya: What you think I’m looking for? I’m not looking for it! I’m looking for something else.
  
  I’m looking for honesty. No unflinching honesty can sting more than my life already does. This is the curse of the well-intentioned. They think they’re doing you a favor by being dishonest. Don’t tell me everything’ll be OK, because I’m fully capable of deluding myself already, without your assistance. Things won’t be OK, unless you define ‘getting used to how hard things are’ as ‘being OK.’ That’s just a fact, neither hard nor soft, bad nor good. I’m not stuck here… This is who I am.
  
  Which brings us back to the question. Where does identity come from? Am I my breath? Am I my skin-ache and hyperfocus? Am I the last time I bought groceries? Am I the last poop I made?
  
  Am I my blind left eye? Am I my good right one?
  

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