I

What is the self? Or more simply, who am I? When I ask myself this question, certain parts of the answer come quickly.

There is the body you inhabit, the body you live in, the body you will die in. There is your action, your behavior, your history – everything you do and everything you’ve ever done. There are the people in your life, your friendships, relationships, all your loves and affections. Take all of it into consideration and you get a good enough sense of who you are. You get most of it.

But then there are the less tangible things that are nonetheless still essential to the question of who we are, these things that exist only in one’s own mind, these things that make up the interior self, the private self that accompanies us in the silence and isolation of night when nothing else does.

This self can make itself known occasionally, translating thoughts, values, beliefs, convictions, faiths, fears and aspirations into existence if you will it. But like putting words to the pages of a bedside dream journal in the moments after waking, it is a hopelessly imperfect endeavor, wholeness and truth always slipping away like smoke and quicksilver through the fingers. But still we persist, wrestling with the formless and amorphous to give it shape.

It’s why, I think, we are so drawn to labels. We see these constructs, these categorizations, concepts sculpted and crafted by wandering minds past, by philosophers and authors, scholars and scientists and think – here is something that can hold me. We pour ourselves into these vessels and marvel at the ease with which we find new shapes, how effortlessly these instruments of identity can find and define our edges.

But this ease is a temptation, a complacency to confuse the kitsch with the real. I’m not sure if it’s my unique pathology or a symptom of the times, this Westernized mid-twenties soul-searching, this yearning attachment to anything that seems to reflect us, this desperation to define ourselves through these boxes built by others. It is this intoxicating relief that comes from being seen, feeling understood after the endless days spent fumbling without the words, dredging through our subconscious, staring at our lives trying to make sense of it all. And so we gather these little pieces, our love languages, our MBTI, our star signs, attachment styles, diagnoses, traits and traumas, adding to our collection, trying to piece the whole of ourselves together as if a curation of glass could ever represent the character of water.

Of course identity has its merits as language, as communication. Simply saying – I am X – conveys the necessary information concisely compared to comprehensively expressing your entire inner self and history to any new person you meet before any interaction you have. It makes it easier to find like-minded people and community, signalling compatibility, understanding. Identity becomes a convenient shorthand for the complex immensity of who you are.

But language, like science like culture like society, is a sign of the times. It can be medical, clinical, delusional, overconfident, dated and flawed. Language meant for a specific purpose with a specific context from the past, however comforting, can limit you. It can insist on the mutilation and contortion of you in their image as the price of admission. We must remember that times can change, times do change, and we are – no, must be – the ones who steward that change.

We cannot cling to these wire mothers blind to their imperfections. We must see them as they are, as tools, as the embodiment of our collective knowledge that continues to move forward. We must assert our own egos, define our own existence, and insist on being whole. I know that there is a loneliness, sometimes a sad inability to accept the things we know as true about ourselves as good until we see it mirrored in the acknowledgement of others. But we cannot let others prescribe to us the story of who we are. We make the world. Not those before us.

II

Even before my great-grandfathers’ time, birds have always known when it’s time to go. I wonder if my parents knew – saw the scratches of the quiet yellow songbird nestled in the small of my chest – that their son was someone who leaves.

I was not a realistic child. I’ve loved stories for as long as I can remember, fantasies full of magical powers, hidden treasures, mystical creatures and grand quests. I spent my days with books in my lap, eyes straining at colorful animated respites on the screen, waiting to one day finally awaken my secret talents as a mage or discover a portal to another dimension. In my heart was the siren song of every world but my own.

As a child you must often field questions of what you want to be when you grow up. Even in their adoration of youth and innocence, adults seemed terribly tethered to ideas of work and value. I think my earliest answer was artist, but with the years and my good grades came adult expectations of success and prestige, of reasonable dreams and financial stability, and my answers soon changed to scientist, or engineer, or whatever made the people around me nod their head in approval at my increasingly sensible pragmatism. With each and every of the many responsibilities of the world I learned of and internalized, this life I wanted drifted ever further until all that was left was a little voice, telling me anywhere but here. We can’t stay here.

I was fourteen when my brother first left for college in New York. I remember crying on the way home from the airport, because even then I knew. Things are never the same once someone leaves.

Immigrants often speak of chasing opportunity and a better life. They echo the many stories of the American dream, tales of prosperity and progress heard in every corner of the world, including my own. Though I didn’t and couldn’t fully buy into the idealism of the time, America seemed like the closest thing to magic left in this world, the nearest match to the songs I no longer heard at home. I did not know if America would save me, but I saw no other choice but to go. With no other destination in mind, I would settle for the land of possibilities.

Life after I left was hard at times but it was also good to me, good for me. College was a chance at new beginnings and I ran with it. In those four years, I reinvented myself and let myself be changed in ways I don’t often anymore. Now I wonder if I was simply coming into who I always was.

I have a theory that people who leave are defined by their restlessness. In looking for a place to be and people to be with, we seem to gather in certain places and I realize now that in every place I’ve ever felt at home – first at a faraway college and now in the big city – I’ve been surrounded by those fellow people far from home, who also felt out of place.

A culture in a foreign place is never a perfect copy of where it came from. It is shaped and influenced not only by the new place it finds itself in but also by the people who bring it, those dreamers and risk takers, the optimistic and the anxious, by those people who leave who arrive carrying with them their perspective of home. It is from this version of tradition and heritage that an immigrant community and immigrant culture is born and takes on a life of its own, sometimes developing, sometimes staying still, but ultimately separately from the motherland, where it is shaped and influenced by the people who stayed.

At my most self-righteous, I judge and pity those people who stay. Too scared to take risks, too afraid of the unknown, or too complacent, they watch their own life pass them by. Or perhaps they have simply learned how, I hope, to be satisfied. Help me, Lord, to be satisfied.

Sometimes I wonder if I am someone who gives up too easily, if that is why I leave, chasing some spectre of an ideal happiness instead of making do and in those insecure moments, I think, maybe, I should’ve tried harder to stay. Maybe if I learned to be a little less selfish, a little more content, if I compromised just a bit more, endured a little while longer, it would’ve worked out. I could’ve made it work. I should’ve made it work. Sometimes I wish I was someone who stayed.

I was twenty-six when a close friend left America and its growing hostility for Berlin. Though I wrote her a letter with all my love and best wishes, I left out some things I didn’t think I should say, the feelings of being the one who stays. I thought of my parents that day, and what they must have also left unsaid.

Mom, I’m sorry. I know my life has been filled with uncertainty and instability and that things really haven’t worked out the way we hoped or imagined. I’m sorry I still don’t regret it. These hardships are bearable to me because I chose this life, a life you may not understand, and I can live with my decisions. I’m just sorry that you have to live with them too. I’m sorry for running headfirst into things you can’t protect me from. I’m sorry for wanting more than what we had, sorry for needing what you could not give. I’m sorry for being gone for so long, for being so far. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being sorry. It just seems to be in my nature.

Sometimes I wish I was free of attachment, truly free to leave and float and let the winds of my whims and the tides of my desire carry me away wherever. Only the world is not so gentle, the seas not so kind, skies far from fair and so I dig in. I hold onto these hurting roots tight and tender, let reality drag me through whatever waters it must.

Dad, I know your son is selfish, a crybaby and a fool but I’m trying. I’m trying my best to be happy. I have somehow stumbled into this life with people who are kind to me and people who care, and I’m building this life the only way I know how, brick by brick. I hope it’s working, hope that one day I will have taken this in-progress life of mine and made something of it. At least then we could look at all this sadness and separation and say it was worth it. At least then my parents could be at ease, say our son is someone who leaves, but at least he’s happy.

Maybe one day this complicated guilt will wash away, leaving nothing but the white sandy shores of a simple grief, pure and true. Maybe one day, there will be nothing left to do but sit and watch the waves come in. But for now, it seems we must live and lie in the wake of our own desires.

It’s been six winters and soon, seven springs. I feel a shift, wings unfurling, the weight of a great wandering seabird lift off my neck. These days, my chest is bursting, ringing with what my little songbird knows. It’s time to go home.

O albatross, carry this restless weary dreamer home.

---

_{1. The title is inspired by a scene from the movie Past Lives by Celine Song, “But
the
truth
I learned
here
is,
you
had
to
leave because
you’re
you.
And
the
reason I
liked
you
is
because
you’re
you. And
who
you
are
is
someone
who leaves. . . . To Arthur, you’re someone who stays.”}

_{2. “We make the world. Not those before us.” is an altered line from the episode Chapter 34: Three Sisters of the audiodrama podcast Midnight Burger by Joe Fisher.}

_{3. “… learned how, / I hope. to be satisfied. // Help me, Lord, to be satisfied.” is a line from the poem Ordinary Sugar by Amanda Gunn.}

_{4. Other influences include A Young Woman’s Guide to Self-Deportation by Goeun Park published in Seventh Wave’s Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting and The Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito.}