On March 25, 2014, in an impulsive act she doesn’t recall, a young woman blew off most of her face. An article in National Geographic covered the ensuing process—from the boyfriend breakup at eighteen when she went into the garage with her father’s shotgun, to the myriad surgeries for functioning eyes, a bit of chin, a snipped bone here, some cartilage there, to the harvesting of the overdosed donor’s face. They documented the day-long surgery with its intricate attachments of vein, artery, muscle, and skin. What the article didn’t address in its ten-page article was who she became. Was she a hybrid of herself and the young woman whose face she now wore?
Lately, I’ve been writing about the ways in which we can “become” someone else—through reincarnation, brain injury, or through organ transplant. What I understood about personality and ego; the stuff that makes up who we think we are has been turned over like river rocks. What is underneath? What is one’s true essence; the essential “I”?
I may be shallow, but I do continue to identify the image in the mirror as me. My face. Me
For years I sat at the feet of a mystic listening to him speak of enlightenment, struck as I was by the notion of letting go of the ego to regain what is apparently a birthright—enlightenment, or simply waking up from this illusory dream. It seemed the only way to go—to drop the busy, chattering mind in favour of unadulterated silence. But as I watch, or rather grasp somewhat frantically, words, names, and promises as they slip away, I’m left with a rather blank canvas of a brain. I don’t believe that’s what he was getting at.
I digress.
Back to the question of who we are, really, and what happens to the “us” we’ve assumed, when an aneurysm takes away some of our personality and chunks of memory, or a transplant alters tastes and desires, or a child believes a stranger is his wife?
Many memoirs, novels, and movies address the various stages of dementia and Alzheimer’s—a disease that can switch a mild and generous lens to a snaky, demanding one—so I’ve not tackled that slow disappearance. But that is yet another example of how one’s wiring can jam, break, or calcify.
I ask, who the hell are we, really? The identities we clutch so fiercely are as fragile as glass, as transmutable as water.
And what of aging? Already, I barely recognize this me in the mirror, the one I think is me. Damn, I thought I was twenty-eight and slim. Who is that old woman who can’t remember the word for… or the name of that wondrous Spanish poet?
To wear someone else’s face or to port around the heart of someone half your age, to be faced with a strange child who seems to know you, or to suddenly find abhorrent the brother you’ve always adored—are you still the same person?
Perhaps it’s best to sit silently and let the grass grow by itself, letting any attempt at thought or plan or remembering just glide on by.
Enlightenment, here I come.
Wonderful thought provoking piece, Deepam. These thoughts came up for me: perhaps the point of aging is to simplify, streamline, take in less and give more away. I continue to believe in the crucible of aging is where my self - the slim, gracious, friendly, platinum blonde me; the me who is a mom; the me who is a therapist; and the older woman with the blotchy hands, wrinkling face, silvery hair and heavy body all come together into the idea that all me’s, taken as a whole, are the real me. For better or worse I am richness and depth, confusion, innocence, forgetfulness, and wisdom. Perhaps I will age into a silver, wrinkled, slim crone. There is excitement ahead!
Beautiful!