Growing up, my sister and I would always bicker over the wall decor in the room we shared. She wanted to paste posters of her favorite sporting stars and I would have none of it. 'I don't want strange people staring down at me while I am asleep', I declared. It did not help that we always liked rival stars and to keep peace, my sister yielded. She created a scrap book of her favorite players instead, with newspaper and magazine cutouts, names nicely stenciled in and emphatic declaration of feelings which I will not include here. On the computer we shared, occasionally, I would sight image files and PowerPoints. When I moved out, I expected she would go all out and cover the walls. Turns out she prefers a dry erase board in the room, scribbling messages every now and then. I smile at her from the background image on the phone and my mom from the wallpaper on her computer. Her walls, remain otherwise, quite bare.
My sister has a thing for tokens, for placeholders and everyday reminders of people she loves and things she likes. If you saw the evidence she leaves behind, without meeting her, you would get a fairly reasonable sense of what she is like. Yet each of her tokens are not meant for us, for public scrutiny, they are meant for her and her alone.
She is not isolated in her practice. We all leave a carefully coordinated trail around ourselves. Posters, books, plants, notes, photographs, chimes, figurines, key chains and some more. Some objects denote our good taste, some our habits, yet others our personal history and fond loves. Together, they create an image of a self. A unique, identifiable signature, if one may call it so. The tokens enable us to describe ourselves. More importantly, they help us describe us to ourselves.
It always hits me in the morning, the loss of self. Sleep somehow seems to take away what little pile I gather. As though, forgetting who I am, is the only way I can get some rest. And even while I lay awake, it takes a while before I recall why I should get up. The sense of the past, the hope for future and what needs to be done today, comes slowly, in a soft trickle.
'Who am I ?', is a much asked question, with few answers. In the scheme of things, Monday to Monday, interspersed with deadlines, meetings, gossip, traffic, boring lunches and to-do lists, it is not a question we contemplate on. What we have instead, is a crude approximation of who we are, a working model to keep us going. We are both, the observer and the principal actor in our lives. It is where we derive our sense of self from, making it a rather fragile construct. With the generous help of props, tiny tokens and constant reminders, we may retain a measure of constancy. Memories are fluid, milling around low points, whichever way we lean.
The self is a story we tell ourselves. I hope mine makes for an earnest narrative.
