Talk about finding who we are…and what defines us as a person/individual…
I remember a particular episode of the old-school series; TWILIGHT ZONE (I guess y’all were too young to watch that shit!) in which the protagonist, a young man woke up in what he thought was his house, beside a woman who he thought was his wife. He woke her up, complaining about the fact that she’d allowed him oversleep, knowing fully well he was supposed to be at work about thirty minutes earlier. He was bantering with her, but she opened her eyes, looked at him and screamed. She did not recognize him. At first, he thought it was a joke, but as he went through his day and he went to work and nobody knew him, and so on, he lost his mind. Or something like that.
Imagine.
Now imagine that happening to you. I know, I know. God forbid. Just play along with me for a bit. What if you woke up, and your better half did not know you; there are absolutely no pictures of you in the house; rather she’s/he’s sharing pictures with some other person, definitely not you. I mean, YOU know YOU’RE YOU, and you remember everything there is to know about YOU…but there’s NO ONE to substantiate your claims. What would you do?
Would you begin to doubt your sanity? I mean, how convinced would you be about your story if the person you’d spent the better part of ten years waking up beside suddenly said they did not know you?? Then you go to your office, and the security guard you had tipped every payday for the past four years did not know you. In fact, he physically handled you and threw you off the premises. Your friends don’t know you anymore, even though you told them about the activities you had shared for the past thirty-something years. You run to your parents, but they do not know you either. They show you pictures upon pictures of their family, and strangely, you do not appear in any. What would you be feeling then? What would you be thinking, that is if you were still capable rational thought?
Would you loose your marbles, or would you be convinced the whole world has gone mad? Would you feel like Neo, who woke up every morning knowing that there was something wrong with the world he could see with his ‘naked eyes’? How strong would your convictions be…and just how far would you go to prove your ‘correctness’? Now imagine you woke up, and you could not remember anything about yourself. You did not recognize the room you were laying in, or the clothes you were wearing, or the person lying next to you. Then that person wakes up and tells you who you are, what you do for a living…and so on. In the space of a few seconds you go from ‘on one’ to ‘Mr. So and so’. What would that matter? Would that make you feel better, like you’re not just a nobody who fell from somewhere into the general scheme of things? Like Hancock who was wondering what sort of person he was, or what he had done that was so bad no one came to claim him?
Any of this making any sense yet?
To Be Continued…
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