Who Am I?

Hey internet friends! Today's insightful thoughts of the day has to do with... the overwhelming number of existential crises I've undergone in my lifetime.

Mostly my problem has to do with the fact that I was a huge reader as a child, and at a very young age I exposed myself to quite a bit of thought provoking literature. Which, in turn, provoked quite a few thoughts. Thoughts which, over time, evolved into deep-seated paranoia.

For our first example of a crisis that has haunted me for years, we will turn to the "What is me?" dilemma. This particular crisis focuses on what constitutes my character. Were I being introduced in a book, how would the author portray me? And more importantly, who is the author? Is it a first-person narrative? Third-person? Objective observer? Does the narrator feel negatively or positively about me? 

Logic dictates that of the ways different observers describe me must overlap at some point, so the words that they have in common must be the truth. Right?

Right?

Next, my poor youthful brain was exposed to science fiction, which introduced to me the concept of "Artificial Intelligence." These were characters which, consciously or otherwise, were actually synthetic humans that were constructed by real life people to imitate human life, but never quite achieve humanity themselves. 

For a brief point in my life, while I was struggling with the emotionless void that was my freshman year of college, I convinced myself that the reason I was unable to experience feelings was because something had gone wrong in my programming, or I had downloaded a virus of sorts.  

But the most recent and most pervasive crisis was the "Imaginary Friend" dilemma. I don't know if it was from a book I read, or maybe an episode of Star Trek I watched, or perhaps a weird dream I had, but there came a time when I had quite thoroughly convinced myself that I did not, in fact, possess a corporeal form. 

I was pretty sure that, instead of being a real person that existed in a normal state of being like all my other friends, I was some form of... um... sprite or spirit or perhaps even an alien that only existed in the minds of others. And the most terrifying bit was that my existence depended on people thinking about me. If, at any point, everyone in the world stopped thinking of me at once, I would simply cease to exist.

I thought that maybe getting married would solve that problem for good, but even your husband can't think about you all the time. He's got better things to think about, like Power Rangers and car bits and stuff. Someone once suggested to me that having a baby would ensure my survival, since a baby would depend on me for its existence, but in my mind that's about half a step above having a cat. Babies don't really do what I would consider thinking... Also, ain't nobody got time for that. No sir.

So I started a blog! If my friends and family can't be constantly thinking about me, at least some Russian spam-bot will be reading my posts and artificially jacking up my stats to make me feel better about my life. And to all of you real live people out there that are reading this right now and pondering my reality, thanks for providing me with enough mind-energy to live another day.