who is this?

towards truer selves

Whenever I discover pictures of an event I was at, I look for myself. Even if I never saw a camera pointed my way, and I even avoided the camera at times, I must pore over the images, zooming into the backgrounds to see if I can find even a glimpse of myself and have a sense of how I appeared at this event. And when I finally find myself, wearing an outfit that I took too much time to select, I never quite recognize the person in the image. When compared to the selfies from the same night or my own memory of my excessive looks in the mirror, every photo of myself seems wholly inconsistent with my own self-perception. Who is that guy? I wonder. Is this how other people perceive me?

What is the image that you, reader, hold in your head of me? Or what image do I hold in my head of you? For plenty of y’all, it will be a profile picture on a social media image either way. For my family and friends that I see frequently, it’s likely a recent real-life memory. And what of the others? Do the people I haven’t seen in years remember me as how they last saw me, or the last photo of me they remember looking at? Do I still look how I did in college to those I haven’t seen since then, just as some of them still look like fellow 22-year-olds in my head?

But there’s even more variation from photo to photo, from day to day, creating an inordinate amount of versions of me. And does it end at just photos? In everything labeled with my name, from my poems to my newsletters to my articles to my social media posts to my websites to my Sweetgreen orders to my text messages, there’s a version of myself represented. From one to another, there’s a different aspect and version of a self represented. Which one is the truest one, if such a thing exists? Does my current feeling, how I feel in this body, looking at another self, harbor any more truth than a prior or later one will?

Maybe. With most of these selves, there’s room for interpretation and misinterpretation, both in the creation of the self and the translation by whoever is perceiving it. Talented portrait photographers are renowned for their ability to evoke vulnerability in their subjects, demonstrate a “true” version of a given person. And writers or musicians or visual artists try to do something similar with their own interiority in their own media — capturing a version of themselves as well as they can, to varying levels of success, bound by both their own capabilities and those of the consumer of their art.

I think about how I consume art from people I’m unfamiliar with. In encountering an essay or article from an unknown writer, I must use context clues to build an uninformed version of them from the writing alone, indexing on a few hundred persons to create a blurry facsimile of a person. In other cases, finding a true version of a person in a work is clouded by outside perception or reputation. I remember being surprised how funny and endearing The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath was, after buying into the overall narrative that she was all doom and gloom due to her eventual demise. But she was more than that; she lived too, wholly and fully, creating beauty that outlived her. But which self was the true one, between the one from her work and the one from her history? Can a true version of a person ever be extracted from any of these artifacts of people’s existence? Are we deluding ourselves in our ability to really understand our fellow man through their art?

Maybe not. Because when I read an essay from a friend, I read with the context of all that I know about them. I notice and am endeared by their fastidious emphasis on clarity of writing, which appears in the structure of their sentences, and smile to myself as I notice an anecdote that they mentioned to me in the past. When I listen to a new song from my brother, I hear the influences of the artists that we grew up listening to and the hundreds of versions I heard before building up to the eventual release. When I watch a film by a director I’m familiar with, one I adore, I notice their choices; I gleefully identify their fingerprints across the art and revel in their latest approach. In these cases, there’s almost a truer self represented, one unmarred by the self-delusions most people subject themselves to, a truth based on love, appreciation.

I hope for a self like that to emerge from my work. And I know, there are so many ways my writing is consumed, but most importantly, it’s read by some of the people that have known me the longest, that see not only the most recent version of me in the text but the smallest version of me, the one they could hold in their arms, the one that they fed and nurtured into what I am today. There are people who have seen me across this entire journey and know me for all that I include in this work and all that I omit, and I so often am writing for them, including the details of a double rainbow, of the Zamboni in London, of the Chicago Blackhawks, just to show them a true version of myself is thinking about them, now and always. Maybe you notice even more within the work than I do, how I’ve changed over time, what I choose not to mention, what I keep mentioning, where I’m deluding myself, and where I’m moving forward.

And I don’t know, not at all, how the others read me, how the words appear to the strangers who stumble into this strange corner of the internet that I’ve cultivated. What image do you see among the ramblings here, the attempts at bringing poetics into my writing, the earnestness, and the topics that don’t yet seem familiar? Maybe stay a while, nest in the letters. With luck, truth may emerge.

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We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza, especially as the government attempts to silence us. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza, a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians, buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families, donating to funds to help families escape.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• ALBUM - Mother by Logic1000 - electronic mix including house and other stuff! one of my favorite records of the year so far

• POEM - “Lies About Sea Creatures” by Ada Limon - Sometimes, you just want / something so hard, you have to lie about it, / so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute