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Capitulation of Self
Lately I've been noticing a recurring theme in a lot of movies, TV shows, games, and so forth: they all seem to deal with what it means to be human, to be alive, what defines an individual-- what gives someone a concrete, valuable self. Since I always tend to think about things like this too much, I eventually came to some conclusions of my own. In the first place, I thought about how, in general, works a person produces such as poems, artwork, music, whatever, are supposed to really give you a picture of who that person truly is. In my case, though, I realized that people can probably get a better idea of who I am from, say, the songs I really like rather than the songs I've written. From there, I decided that maybe people are really defined not by what they produce or what they do, but by what they love. In that case, a person would just be the sum total of all the things he cares about, and, following the train of thought further, to stop liking something, anything, would be to lose a part of yourself. I think we're all afraid of losing our identity, which is why so many dystopian works focus on the obliteration of personal definition in the form of individual thought and freedom.
Personally, I'm a fangirl, by which I mean that I tend to obsessively like various things including but not limited to video games, movies, cartoons, comic books... the list goes on. Sometimes, after I've really loved a certain series for a while, and I start to cool down in my zeal for it, I get a little sad. I can't help it if I don't like something as much as I used to, but I never want to stop liking anything. I've always thought that my most prevailing fears were failure of any kind or mere adequacy, but maybe if my strange little thought about personality is at all true, I'm really just afraid of leaving the self I recognize behind and accepting the constant metamorphosis into infinitely newer versions of myself. I suppose that what I truly fear is uncertainty in the future-- maybe that the self I'll become one day won't be someone I want to be, that I'll wish I could go back to being the person who obsessed unabashedly over the Monkees and Sailor Moon. But, as one person put it in one of my favourite comic books: "The day you stop changing is the day you die." That's why becoming a person with different interests, different habits, different loves-- a different person-- is really all right. No matter what happens, no matter how much I change, even if everything I once was is gone and I don't have any of the things I started with-- I'll still be myself, and that will never change.
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