Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Later Years 2012: Fractured

Originally Posted on December 28th, 2012.

     What is identity?  What defines a person?  Is it the present moment, the way in which an individual lives in the now that defines who they are?  Or is it the collective moments, the past, full of experiences, that shapes the identity?

     Can a person have two identities?  Can they exist in balance with the other?  Can a person really choose their identity? What happens when an individual can no longer surround themselves with those comfortable things that they believe makes them who they are?  When an individual is taken out of their known environment, when they are separated from those things, all those things that they believe defines them, what happens to them?  What becomes of their identity?  Does it get remolded? Does it continue to be defined by the past, full of things? Or does it split, becoming fractured?
Perhaps that is what is happening to me.  My identity, my self, my individuality has become fractured.  I am no longer the me of the past, the reality I took so long to construct.  I am just in the now, floating, yet reminiscing about the past, wanting to cling, but without much to cling to.  I am now someone or something different, yet not easily defined.  This mesh between America and India, a neophyte of identity, belonging to nowhere.  I no longer belong to the society, the reality, the American identity I had.  Yet I will never belong to India, its culture or its people.  I am lost, uncomfortably foreign, unfitted, unreal.  Alive but not subscribing.  A stranger to myself, I no longer know who I am.

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