I Don’t Know Myself Like You Do: A Coming of Age Story For All-Ages

In every birthday, I have expected this big change, like I wake up and my hair is in a different color or I have grown significantly more since I have slept or I just got a brand new talent. Well, it is no surprise that none of that happened except the day I dyed my hair on my birthday but I guess that doesn’t count.

Against everything I said above, every year I am this new me. Maybe not physically but mentally. I get new interests, I like different genres of books or I start to drink coffee black and it doesn’t make me want to puke suddenly. Every year I think, yeah, this is me. That is my personality now I will never change, I am the best version of me but every year that changes and I start making fun of the old me. That is when I realized that I can never look at myself objectively. I will never see myself like the local baker sees me or like my childhood friends that drifted apart does or like my mom or like you, a reader of this weird, way too personal blog of mine. Just like Arthur Rimbaud said:

“Je est un autre”

“I is somebody else” or “I is another”

The “self” is something we rediscover all our lives and it should sometimes be seen as a different person. That is why Rimbaud uses the third person of the verb even though he is referring to himself. Knowing one is impossible in one life time, even ourselves. Screw every year, every day, every minute with ourselves is a mystery. We change, doesn’t matter if we want to or not, and we do get affected by our environment, by the people we met to books we read to movies we watched and it is no doubt that every person we’ve had connected with will narrate us differently in their own story. That’s the plot and plots are untouchable.

So yeah, every age, every birthday is a new coming of age trope in your life, in your own plot. Assimilate it.