Joe Collins

Neil Gaiman once said that the best description of a story was the story itself, and that the best map of any landscape would be the landscape itself. He then said it would also therefore be useless.

What he meant was that to understand something, to see it exactly as it is, and to know what it is, you must see it as it is. It cannot be diluted with explanation or sullied with bias. It must be lived to be understood. However the tragedy of humanity is that we have too little time to explore landscapes, and people. And that we will never truly understand anything.

Well, he could have meant something else, but that's what I took away from it.

I recently had a relatively small identity crisis. I felt that I didn't know who I was.

When I asked people who I was, they often replied with "You're Joel, you wear black, you're crazy."

I was dissatisfied. I explored myself, asking that same question over and over. I often replied with, "You're a liar" or "You're one of six and a half billion people" or "You're insane".

So I asked someone who loves me who they thought I was, she replied that "You are smart, honest and I love you"

That rather contradicted what I felt about myself but I plowed on ahead.

I was then going to ask someone who knows me very very well what he thought of me, but it was two in the morning at this point. So he was probably sleeping off the maths homework.

I realized though, that the only reason why I had this lack-of-self-knowledge feeling, was that that's just how I was programmed.

Humans see patterns where they do not exist. And one of those patterns is our sense of identity.

I recovered enough to eat some cheese and go to sleep.


I still don't know who I am, but I do know exactly who I'm not, that is, anyone else.