I wrote this “personal statement” for a writing class I am taking this semester, and since the prompt asked us to write this statement for entry onto a blog, I figured I should probably go ahead and post the final draft to my real blog! Here you are:
Three words, spoken as a question, can bring both the strong and the weak to their knees. Fathers, mothers, children, adults, the rich, the poor, the idealist, the realist, the atheist, and the believer, all shall succumb to the power of the words, if they but say them with reverence and honesty. Three of the shortest words are these: Who am I? The cocksure might change their order and proudly say, “Who I am,” but the philosopher, the poet, and the garbage collector know the folly of such vanity. When spoken from a place of honesty, the words can only truly form a question for us mortals, and an ever-changing one at that. Once one recognizes the importance of this question, it can come to dominate and give purpose to one’s every action and thought.
Yet most people I know never really ask themselves, “Who am I?” Perhaps this comes down to our culture and our language. Our culture seems to be full of people looking for their “identity,” but doing so only within the context of other people and other things instead of taking a quiet moment to contemplate the question, “Who am I?” As a result, even the word “identity,” has grown shallow and has come to describe not the essence of who each person is, but rather the people and things each person cares for. (A useful note: if I use the word “identity,” from here on, I do not mean this shallow worldly definition, but rather the deep and all-important answer to the question that I have mentioned many times already.) Perhaps people are scared to ask, “Who am I?” because for some reason the words sound whiny in English, which could certainly be connected to the aforementioned shallowness that has become linked to any search for identity. As a possible remedy to this, I tend to like the Latin translation of the words better: Quis sum ego? Maybe I am biased because I love Latin, but as most things written in Latin tend to be more serious than flippant, the language seems to better transfer the meaning of those three words into a concrete feeling. I can see a Roman politician with a furrowed brow sitting in the Senate at the end of the day – after all the other members have gone home to their favorite bottles of Alban wine – muttering to himself over and over, “Quis sum ego?” The character could readily be played by Charlton Heston in the 1970s Hollywood version of this digression.
Moving back to the point at hand, you might be wondering whether I have ever asked myself this question that I seem to hold in such high regard. For many years, I operated under the same shallow view of my identity as much of the rest of the world. The few times when someone actually asked me, “Who are you?” I thought this a very strange question and answered it with something like, “Well, I’m Mark, of course.” If they pressed further for a somewhat deeper answer, I would begin to mumble out obscure accomplishments, passions, and the like. I know so much about how one can avoid asking and answering this most existential question precisely because I avoided it most of life. In fact, I never actually took a long enough look inside of myself to ask a question like, “Who am I?” (I still said it in English at that point) until just before my 21st birthday.
As my birthday approached, I was in the midst of the deepest identity crisis of my life. The year and a half prior had been a roller coaster of depression and confusion, and it all came to a head in those early months of 2009. My undergraduate studies were coming to an end, not because I had completed a degree, but rather because I did not have the desire to continue forward with one. The men and women whom I considered my friends had either abandoned me or had been pushed away by my actions. The hours I spent brooding in my room greatly outnumbered those spent in the company of others. I felt like I stood on the brink of a precipice being buffeted by fierce winds from all sides. Pushed to an edge so steep, I had three choices: I could jump off the edge and offer myself to the mercy of the cliffs, I could stand on that spot and slowly whither away in the winds until I was swept away like dust, or I could turn around and try to make my way in a different direction.
I despised the power those winds of isolation and self-loathing imposed on me, so I knew staying still could not be the way. To jump or turn? Now, don’t take that statement as an option between life and death; both paths involved my life continuing. The jump in this instance was a complete change of scenery; a jump from my comfort zone into a new and foreign world. Standing on that cliff, it seemed more logical to just continue forward rather than to turn around, and so one night, overcome with the deep sort of despair bred only in isolation and loneliness, I laid out my plan. In just one evening of frenzied work, I had chosen a new place to live, Lihue, Kauai, Hawaii, found a loft for rent, contacted the landlord, and figured out that by selling my car I could get enough start-up money for the flight and first month’s rent. I even found a job opening at a small store down the street from my prospective apartment and sent an e-mail to the manager. My mind was made up. Within the month I would jump off the cliff and move to Hawaii, and nothing could stop me!
My father stopped me. Truthfully, he didn’t physically stop me, but the next day I called him and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the plan my sudden burst of action had nearly completed the night before. I took a big breath and tabled Kauai, just for the moment though, I told myself. Around this same time, as if to betray the side of me that wanted to jump off the cliff, something that had lain dormant in my soul began to resurface. I was raised in a Catholic family, but I slowly drifted away from the faith after I left for school simply because life in college was easier without a conscience. The ultimate act of “turning around” for me would be to return to that faith, and inertia makes turning very difficult. At the same time, my worldly life of passions had only brought upon me despair and pain, so I began to seek something higher. I started going back to Mass. I adamantly told those who asked me that I wasn’t really going back to Mass, though, and I made up the story that a girl I liked was drawing me there. Despite these claims, I would sometimes find myself sitting in the pews at the old brick church on the Hill without concretely remembering how I got there. I particularly gravitated to a Tuesday night candlelit liturgy that featured a Latin chant choir. I liked the candles, the incense, and the music because they were so beautiful, and I liked the darkness because it allowed me to think. Sometime later I wrote on this very blog that I had been, “drawn into the peaceful darkness within because the darkness without was unsettling to my soul.”
In those pews, surrounded by that peaceful darkness, I finally spoke the fateful words into the perfumed and candlelit air: “Who am I?” Like my Roman politician, I asked over and over. I asked within the context of lengthy and angry rants, and I asked through the wordless simplicity of bitter weeping. For the first time in my life, I truly asked. For the first time in my life, I truly received. I received no radical Divine Revelation, no word from God Almighty to pick me up and give me eternal peace. Instead, I received a community of faith and a steady direction in which to travel. I turned from the cliff, and found a beautifully narrow road called the Catholic Church. In the years since, this road has led me to the heights of the Andes and the slums of Lima. I have seen the beauty of cathedrals and the beauty of homeless shelters. I have spent time learning from lofty-minded academics and humble-souled Franciscan friars. All done in search of an answer to an answerless question I posed to the darkness some three years ago this February.
So the question remains, and will always remain, “Quis sum ego?” I have come to believe, as I have already implied, that a person can never come to an end of answering this question. The inappropriate, yet common, response to the knowledge that we can never fully answer this metaphysical and eternal question is hopelessness — that is, to cease asking the question and instead curl up into a dismal ball of despair. The appropriate response, however, requires turning our very lives into a search for the answer, which is itself the road I speak of. I have found myself guilty of the hopelessness of the first response many times in my life, some even quite recently. I also clearly understand the ridiculousness of that perspective and how I should be living instead, but because I am a broken human being, I tend to ignore my reason and sweep myself away into that land of despair and ugly self-pity. To prevent myself from falling into such a trap again, and to otherwise hold myself accountable to the ideals I want to live by, I now surround myself with the aforementioned community. The members pick me up when I fall off the road and I do the same for them.
So if this road I have mentioned is in some way the actual answer to the question, “Quis sum ego?” where is it leading? Will such a path ever lead to true knowledge of one’s identity? My answer is yes; but only in one instance: death. You see, I have this sneaking suspicion that when we die and come before the Just Judge, He will look deeply, lovingly into our eyes and simply tell us who we really are. The full knowledge of how we did or did not live up to this, the ultimate reality of our being, will be our conviction and our acquittal. In that line of thinking, it follows that we should seek to know the One who will speak to us on that day, the One who understands who we are better than we do ourselves. Walking the road that seeks self-knowledge then becomes synonymous with one that seeks the knowledge and the love of God. This road, rather than being hopeless, suddenly brims with the hope that on that Day of Judgment we might have grown to know God, and therefore ourselves, well enough that the words we hear might sound less strange to our ears and more like a description of the lives we just finished living moments before. Until that day when I will finally know the complete answer, I can happily respond to this ultimate human question as St. Teresa of Avila once did: “We shall never know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God.” And so I shall endeavor.
