Have you ever had that feeling?
A strong feeling that you are dreaming and you are going to wake up any second now.
I had that feeling once.
My friend and I, we were standing in the middle of a field on a bright sunny afternoon.
The sky was blue and the clouds were puffy and dramatic.
At that moment, something happened in me, a slight shift in perspective, I thought 'This
can't be real, I am definitely dreaming', the moment I had that thought everything around
me became alive.
The field, clouds and the distant farmhouse were all so sharp.
The peculiar part about that experience was that I didn’t experience the separation,
maybe for that split second.
In a way I experienced the brief collapse of I, my identity.
To me, that moment in the field was something special, something unexplainable yet so simple.
I always wonder how our reality and our sense of identity are flimsy.
I was at a restaurant once, in Toronto, late at night, eating sushi all by myself.
I had this memory, memory of my family, my home country; I was far away from them in
another continent.
I felt this loneliness followed by a strong urge to see them.
But then, this thought occurred.
What if the minute I leave this restaurant and try to call my family and then I learn
that they don't exist.
I've always been here and there was never any family or a home country.
That thought frightened me quite a bit, not because that could happen to me, but how the
sense of identity and my memories, which is who I am, could easily be meddled with.
It is who we are but it is not something tangible and that's frightening.
'Nilungal Rajave' is a 1980's Tamil language novel written by one of my favorite science
fiction authors called Sujatha.
He played a major part in my existential crisis.
What happens when one day, all of a sudden, everyone in your life forgets about you,
they don't recognize who you are or anything about you?
That's the premise of that story which talks about a case of Dissociative Personality Disorder.
Reading that story as a kid, I was so fascinated by this idea of identity collapse.
Others' idea of you is equally important as your idea of yourself.
I was brought up in a very small town in India, where everybody was in everybody's business.
Later when I moved to Toronto, Canada, I experienced a first hand, identity disorientation.
I was no one in my new city.
No one knew me.
I was wandering the busy streets, all by myself.
Financial buildings and malls overwhelmed me.
So many thousand windows clustered together in the condo towers that were towering towards
the sky.
Yet, I found that it was a society of isolation.
I was completely lost and I couldn't communicate the essence of my innermost thoughts and feelings
to someone who was far far away, to some one who was just a voice.
There, it happened.
I had no identity of myself as no one cared.
My identity didn't matter because of the absence others' idea of my self.
I soon took on the identity of the city.
Cold, alone, distant and isolated.
I find that our identity is like a chameleon.
It latches on to identity of where we live, whom we are with and who our friends are.
I was blissfully absorbed by the identity of the city.
Soon, I began to meet people, I began to work, go to the theaters with friends, I had a life.
People recognized me in the subway.
I was not the city anymore; I became someone who lived in the city, some one who knew others.
I was not a mere observer.
My friends and co-workers expected me to behave in a certain way based on their impressions
and I gladly, behaved how they wanted me to behave.
After all, that was my identity.
Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises an interesting question about identity.
Philosopher Plutarch asks if the ship on which the Greek hero Theseus sailed has been so
heavily repaired and nearly every part replaced, is it still the same ship — and, if not,
at what point did it stop being the same ship?
This paradox has many variations and it even extends to us.
In a way, everyone I met in my life so far shaped my identity in one-way or the other.
I never knew I could walk in the pouring rain and enjoy the moment, until I did that with someone
Years, later that became a part of my identity.
Now, I am someone who enjoys walking in the rain.
I am sure I would pass it on to someone else.
Things that defined me when I was a kid, my identity back then are not the same anymore.
Like the Ship of Theseus, aspects of my identity were removed and replaced with time.
Am I then the same kid who went to explore the haunted house in his bicycle, all those
years ago?
This thought that identity is a shared sense of the observer and the observed is what makes
questions like 'What if everyone in your life forgets who you are?' fascinating
because, all of a sudden, if everyone in your life did forget you, you got to ask yourself, is
it because they actually forgot who you are, as a person or is it because of your misplaced memory?
Are you sure that you are who you think you are?
Have you ever experienced any form of existential crisis?
If yes, tell me about it in the comment section below and we can continue the discussion there.
I also, wanted to tell you about my upcoming film The Shadow World, a psychological thriller.
It’s probably 35 min. long.
I am currently editing it.
It’s a no budget film.
I shot it on $150 budget in and around Toronto.
I am including the trailer here and a playlist of this series.
If you liked the video, share it with your friends in social media and most importantly,
subscribe to my channel, as I will be posting new videos like this every week.
Thank you for watching and see you soon.