What haunts me
Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I “haunt”. I must admit this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am.
- Nadja, André Breton
That is a quote that habits my brain, that I think about at least once a day.
I have used this quote many times when writing on my journals, rewrote it to encompass my current thoughts and feelings, and truly, I don’t know what is so especial about this particular quote. Except, I guess, for the unsettling question that starts it. It is natural to wonder who we are, but some people, like me, tend to question this quite often. Who am I? Truly, Who am I? If I were to rely on something, I would once have relied on my dreams. I used to resume myself to my dreams. But today I would say that I would rely on the questions: what is most dear to me? What do I love the most in this world? What is the force that urges me to live? What is that something or someone without which my existence would be unbearable? And by that I believe that the question of who we are would be automatically answered, or at least to a certain extent, because it implies that we are those very answers, we are what is most dear to us, we are what we love, we are the desires, the forces that urges us to continue living and moving.
There are moments in our lives when we are forced to face certain questions or matters, such as love or death. I think these two words have the power to arouse everyone into a deep conversation. What is love? Is there true love or is it only a figment of imagination born of stories and fairy tales? What comes after death? Can we have the chance to be here once agin or today is all we got?, and these moments mark a changing point in our life. They force us to see beyond the mere questions, pushing us to question ourselves, the universe, life, society, more and more and more. Once you’ve seen someone dead, per example, you cannot unsee it. It is forever there. You see a body, you are afraid to touch it, it is not natural, what is this, where is the person that a second behind could see and smell and feel? You wonder what is in this body now that it cannot move, cannot react, cannot express anything but is unchanged eternity? Where has the person that inhabited this body gone to? Why am I here if I am to be that way one day too? How little or how much have I felt life, lived life till this moment of my life? We then feel self conscious as never before, we feel our heart beating and feel our warmth and look at the sun and marvel at how beautiful it is to simply be and how have I never noticed that before? Of course, perhaps some people have and they just wonder about it all over again, it is as feeling the feeling for the first time again but to some people is the first time and they can either be forever changed or simply let go of the infinity of feeling a human body and mind and soul can be, and just go back to numbness because its so easy is so simple and I don’t have to fear the loss of it. These moments force us to see that things don’t actually matter but while we are here it has to matter, or our self will be unbearable and so we discover that we have to create a meaning, we have that ability and so what, oh dear god, what will we do with our lives now? Now that we see, that we perceive? And suddenly our responsibility becomes greater than everything has ever been for we know now everything is in our hands but at the same time we are grateful, for just one second, for not being that cold body we see because now you learned you can have a different life than you had and is so exciting, is all new. And its hard you will find, if of course you let yourself be changed by the feeling, but it will be worth it, because one second of sun wind sea rain love worths more than decades of tears sadness loneliness.
And so, you see now, how all changes? And how it has to change eventually for us to progressively be able to answer all those questions I labeled essential to our understandment of ourselves to then be able to answer the great, rebelling question of “Who am I?”.
by Antônia D. G. Lau