Glimpse Of My Identity Crisis

Author: Cassandra

I think I’ve spent most of my life watching people.

Not in a creepy way.

Well.

Maybe a little.

When I was younger, I used to watch adults and try to figure out how they worked. What they wanted. What they were hiding. What made them say yes instead of no. What kind of person you had to become if you wanted something from them.

At the time, my objectives were extremely sophisticated.

Chocolate.

Staying up late.

Getting away with things.

Nothing particularly evil.

Just research.

I think I kept doing it.

Only the questions got more complicated.

Now I watch people because I want to understand how they think.

Not necessarily because I like them.

That’s the part I’ve never really known what to do with.

I can be extremely interested in someone and simultaneously feel almost nothing toward them.

I’ll want to know why they behave the way they do. I’ll notice what makes them laugh, what they avoid, what they seem insecure about, who they gravitate toward, how they change when someone more important enters the room.

And then I can go home and forget their name.

Sometimes even their face.

It’s not deliberate.

My brain just seems to have an enormous trash folder.

University made it especially obvious.

I walked into this huge new environment where everyone was meeting everyone, exchanging names, forming groups, finding their people.

I mostly stood there thinking:

Interesting.

I met people.

I talked.

I laughed.

I played chess with people much better than me and lost.

One person in particular ended up spending a ridiculous amount of time talking to me. We walked around, joked, talked about random things, and eventually exchanged Instagram accounts.

Apparently this is how normal human social interaction works.

I think.

The strange thing is that the interaction itself was almost completely flat inside my head.

I don’t mean unpleasant.

It wasn’t.

I enjoyed it.

But enjoyment and attachment aren’t the same thing.

I remember information about him.

I remember things he was good at.

I remember pieces of his life.

I remember thinking that knowing him could be useful in the wonderfully innocent sense that one person knows other people, and other people know other people, and suddenly you’re standing in the middle of a network you didn’t have yesterday.

A shield.

A bridge.

A chess opponent.

A person.

In that order?

I don’t know.

That’s the problem.

I don’t always know what my own motives are until after I’ve acted on them.

Sometimes I realize I’ve been doing something strategically only after I’ve already done it.

The funny thing is that I don’t think I’m particularly good at manipulating people.

I’m much more interested in understanding the machinery than pretending I don’t see it.

Maybe that’s why I spend so much time studying everyone else.

Because people are easier to observe from the outside.

Myself?

That’s different.

I don’t always know what I’m feeling while I’m feeling it.

It’s like being submerged in water.

If you’re inside the water, how exactly are you supposed to determine whether it’s water or something else?

You need something outside yourself to compare it to.

So sometimes I look at other people.

Everyone is excited.

Why am I not?

Everyone is nervous.

Why am I not?

Everyone seems to remember the people they met yesterday.

Why can’t I even remember what that guy looked like?

Sometimes that comparison tells me something.

Sometimes it tells me absolutely nothing.

And sometimes I don’t even know whether there is a problem.

I’ve spent years trying to understand what kind of person I am.

I’ve collected theories about myself the way other people collect hobbies.

Maybe I’m this.

Maybe I’m that.

Maybe I’m just overthinking everything.

Maybe I’m not.

The more I look, the less certain I become.

There are things about myself that I can describe perfectly.

There are other things that I can only describe from the outside.

And there are some things I don’t even know are there until another person reacts to them.

That’s probably the most unsettling part.

I can understand other people without necessarily caring about them.

I can care about someone without understanding why.

I can remember completely useless information about a stranger while forgetting their name.

I can spend hours talking to someone and later have almost no emotional trace of the conversation.

And somehow all of this exists in the same person.

Me.

Maybe that’s what an identity crisis actually feels like.

Not necessarily standing in front of a mirror and screaming because you don’t know who you are.

Maybe it’s much quieter.

Maybe it’s sitting there, perfectly functional, watching yourself behave, and occasionally thinking:

Why did I do that?

And waiting for your own brain to explain.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

So I keep watching.

People.

Patterns.

Reactions.

Myself.

I keep trying to figure out the rules.

Maybe one day I’ll understand them.

Maybe I’ll just get better at pretending I do.

Either way, tomorrow I’ll meet more people.

They’ll tell me their names.

I’ll probably forget most of them.

And somewhere in the background, my brain will quietly decide who gets to stay.

I won’t even be there when it makes the decision.