who we are

“I am a part of all that I have met.”  Tennyson wrote this line over 150 years ago, and they seem to make sense to me.  When I was a kid, I used to think about what made me different than everybody else.  I remember that I imagined myself as a dot in the middle of a sort of web, with so many points that I couldn’t count (or even think of them all) being tied to me through lines of influence.  The closest dots to the center (where ‘I’ am) were, at the time, my parents, grandparents, some teachers, and a few friends; the next level were people like kids my mom babysat, aunts & uncles, random friends, etc.  Past that, things got hairy.  I knew that there were a whole lot of other dots, a whole lot of other people that I knew probably had something to do with me, but I never actually knew them.  One influenced me in one way, another in a random way, yet another in a way I don’t remember.

As time goes on, all of these new dots keep popping up into this matrix of my life.  Some people start out on the fringes, and slowly work their way towards the center, becoming more and more influential, not in a direct and obnoxious way, but just in the way that everybody makes a million tiny adjustments in their behavior when we spend time with someone.  Other people, those rare individuals, simply pop up and immediately they are integral, in a way you can’t describe very well, but in a way you simply know.  One’s not better than the other, they simply exert influence in a different way.

Everyone I have met has left a part of themselves in me; their voices are in my head, though I can’t tell them apart.  The I of myself is unique, not because of any essentialism of my identity (although I think that identity is unique and growing every day, making it unavoidably different and special) but because there is no one else that has had every experience, every interaction, every love, every fight, every long evening, every late night study session, an accident on their bicycle, a dog named Dixie, all the movies I’ve seen at the right moment.  I am not only part of all that I have met; everything I have met is a part of me, and in that neverending and unknowable process of social alchemy I am formed in every moment of every day.