One of the questions I keep finding myself asking is “Who are you?”
I also wonder this about other people. And I don’t mean this in ways or adjectives to describe myself or others. But the actual who that describes why someone is the way they are.
I am not talking about the physical aspects of getting my parents’ features or my sister, who looks like me.
Everything you do is a reflection of someone else, but of whom? Most of our daily lives, what we do and say, isshaped by someone else. You are formed by everyone you have met.
The other day, my roommates were stunned by the way I say “alcohol.” After living together all year, they just realized I don’t say it as they do or what they claim is “normal.” I knew I wasn’t crazy, though, so I called my mother just to see how she says it, and sure enough, we say it the same way.
One of my roommates loves to eat packs of tuna and seaweed together; most of us secretly hated her for it. Yetby the end of the year, all seven of us had those packs of tuna in our cabinets all the time.
I played college field hockey, not because one day I woke up and wanted to, but because my high school friends did, and I fell in love with it. I found a path to college through something they saw as a fun way to pass the time.
I have a friend who lives in Spain, and I know her coffee order by heart even though I see her once a year… Butit is because her coffee order is the same one I had in the 10th grade when she tried Dunkin’ Donuts for the first time.
My father was a smoker, and I will never touch a cigarette. But I love sunsets and open water, and you will never see my father missing a chance to watch the sunset over the water.
My taste in music is different at home and at school. For the simple reason that the songs connect with different people.
I taught some of my roommates how to parallel park, but I learned from Dad.
And so many other times in my apartment, we catch ourselves saying, “I didn’t do this before I lived with you.” Yet now those things shape our humor and who we are.
Though it doesn’t have to be someone you know. Strangers whom you interact with all the time shape what you do.
Today I was bartending and had several people order a drink at the bar, simply because a stranger they nevereven saw ordered it, and they watched me make it. It could be somebody’s new favorite drink, and the only reason they thought of getting it was that I made it for someone else.
You determine your life based on your determination of others.
No one is 100 percent original; we are all mosaics of everyone you know and everyone who you know knows.
