Are we not Prisms?
I used to think that who you are stayed the same no matter what happened to you–that the core of you, your essence, the stuff that gave you your identity, was immutable and that no matter what you experienced, you were as a circle around another circle on a tree ring, nothing greater. It was significant, of course, this experiential shaping, but it did not change the being you were beneath the trappings.
I don’t know that I believe that anymore. Or, if I do, it is that I believe that we–you and I–are like prisms. We refract light differently depending on the angle at which you gaze upon us. Now, again, that is not to say that who we are depends, as would be so in the perverted version of the Heisenberg Principle, on who looks upon us–only that we are not always the same person or people and that the situation in which we find ourselves is the thing that governs which self emerges most clearly and dominantly at any given moment.
That is to say, it’s not that I’ve given in to the truth behind either the “nurture” side of the nature v. nurture debate or that of the “nature” side, which I guess is the one I may have semi-unwittingly supported before–only that in my more mature state, I have thought that both have a deep impact on who you are but also that where before I thought the self unchangeable, I think that the meaning within the worn-out cinematic phrase “you’ve changed”–said with an air of melancholy or heavy disappointment–is, indeed, possible, and if cliche, then it’s a cliche born from truth and not unnecessary grandiosity.
I say this because I have changed. As I’ve said before, I did not think it possible. I clung to the stubborn belief that the “I” beneath the other “I”s and all the crazy things I had gone through or that I had learned and ingested was the same, no matter the age or place. But that’s simply not true anymore. In fact, I can little recognize the “I” of two years ago as it compares to the perhaps more adult incarnation of the “I” I see every morning in the mirror (and the “I” of two years ago little compares to the “I” of two years before that, and so on), unclear as it is at such an early hour.
Perhaps I over-think things. Be that as it may, I still believe that we are prisms. When we go through new things, the light we contain at our greatest hour can manifest itself in various ways within us, and that, in turn, can see its release from us in various forms. The things I held dear before are those I hold dear now. But am I the same I? I’m not so sure anymore that I am. My priorities may, at their core, be the same, but the way I comport myself, the things that I think when I’m driving long stretches alone with the music only touching one part of my consciousness, are not the same. I think it’s a function of age and that experience. I think that it follows that when you learn new things, the things you will consider will change. But there you go. Maybe buried deep (or really not so deep) within this new self is that old one and that older one and that older one still, but the one you see, the one I feel, is different. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe I’ll revert back to a self I was before. Or I won’t. And that’s OK too.