I can finally say that I have luckily survived my flight, despite my constant paranoia throughout the whole trip and my brain asking me questions like "Are we really meant to be flying this high?" After catapulting (yes, the exaggeration is necessary) my body 40 000 feet in the air, with no chance to escape or any other options that wouldn't involve jumping out or in other words, death, I was left with simply accepting my fate. It got me thinking how ridiculously stupid it seems that we blindly trust so many people throughout the whole process of getting to the airport, walking to the gate, taking our seat and purchasing that shitty coffee that would of course only aggravate the anxiety that comes with placing our bodies unnaturally high up in the air. We mindlessly smile and even thank complete strangers for influencing and partly deciding our fate, or at least what our next steps will be, without even questioning it. How strange is it that we live in a (partly functioning) collective of strangers - and we always manage to integrate ourselves in it.
I am aware that we are always surrounded by strangers and inevitably are strangers ourselves. But feeling like a stranger in your own home is an unfamiliarity, I didn't really experience until I came back home for Easter. Suddenly I was surrounded by faces that I had seen before, buildings I had step into, and procedures I had gone through more than once; all things that now felt like images from a previous dream rather than earlier life. The smell of my own house seemed unknown to me, the white walls that surrounded me had a brighter shade of white, and even my own room looked like it had expanded while I had been away. It was when I looked at my artwork, the books I used to read, and the person I used to be in the pictures that now struggled to remain stuck on my bedroom walls, that I noticed I had become a stranger to myself.
Whenever you leave behind what used to be part of you, it becomes this old photo album from your childhood you keep hidden in the box in the far corner of your room, only taken out when the family gets together to reminisce about old times and memories our previous Selves have made. I used to think that the girl in those pictures wasn't me anymore, as if I had become someone else and she wasn't part of who I am. Perhaps I have been wrong. The self-centered human being I am, I have come to the conclusion that to understand who I am and what I want, I need to remind myself of who I was and how this made me not necessarily who I have become, but how I have become myself (eight I's in one sentence, now try to reach that level of narcissism). As Nietzsche stated
"The past of every form and way of life, of cultures that formerly lay right next to or on top of each other, now…flows into us “modern souls”
and that
"Direct self observation is not nearly sufficient for us to know ourselves: we need history, for the past flows on within us in a hundred waves.”
Although I know that he was talking about a greater picture, the influence ancient humanity and animality had on our way of life and being today, I think this can be applied to an individual's existence and own past, too.
In the next few days, I will meet old friends that the earlier stages of my Self knew all too well, but today might almost seem somehow strange. I will see places, where memories have been made, and well documented through my passion for Instagram and everyone’s desire to showcase everyone else they receive affirmation and validation (thank you for making us even more self-obsessed, Snapchat). It will be interesting to see what we will create together this time. Hopefully, I will manage to integrate, find out that where I once belonged I can feel affiliation like I did before, and most importantly that I once again become who I am.
