Michael Garza poses the question of identity:

How much of you is you? When you hang around people for long periods of time you begin to acquire some of their traits. You may pick up part of their attitude, sense of humor, motivations, accents, grammar, and body language. Sometimes you have situations in which two mutual friends are around you at the same time, and your personality is thrown off a bit.

I often wonder how my life would be different if my parents hadn't moved down to Texas. Would I still be to the right-of-center? Would I still enjoy the cold weather as I do? These are, of course, the smaller questions.

If I'd stayed up there, I would have made different friends. I would have known different people and would have, to an extent, lived a different life. Or maybe I wouldn't have. My experiences certainly feed in to who I am, but the question is to what extent have the warped me rather than contributed to me. There are numerous instances in my past where I've found "lessons learned" to be more obfuscating than direction. Forget what I know, don't feel what I feel, and so on.

It brings to mind the notion that "it is, therefore it ever was going to be" which is my guiding principle which states that I am who I am because of what I have chosen to be. The seemingly chance encounters were destined to happen, in a way.

I don't mean fate. I mean that what comes back around is directly in relation to what goes around. For instance, I think of the first girl to hurt me. I could fixate on the fact that she hurt me (and I did just that for quite a while) or I could point out that I had put myself in a position to be hurt, and if she hadn't done so, someone would have because of who I was.

Unfortunately, this type of thinking lends itself to trying to change oneself and pulling yourself away from your true identity. Of course, the inverse of that is to accept every limitation you have, keep inviting the vampires in, and completely fail to grow and begin viewing maturity as the high crime of authenticity failure.

The subject reminds me of a story I have in mind called The Many Lives of Desmund Usher, which stars Kara Rhodes and Desmund Usher. Rhodes is a CIA agent whose job it is to weave through alternate timelines (closely knit to our own) in order to retrieve a password from Usher, a different CIA agent who was buried with a password in Rhodes's original timeline.

Without getting too much into the details, one of the interesting revelations is in all of these closely knit timelines, Rhodes is exactly the same person. No matter what curveball her life was thrown, she walked the straight-and-narrow. Usher, on the other hand, is someone completely different in every timeline. With each flap of the butterfly's wing, Usher pursues an entirely different path from media magnate to Texas Supreme Court Justice to career criminal. Usher succeeds at whatever he chooses to do while Rhodes can seemingly only do one thing (and does it well). Usher's identity is a big question mark while Rhodes's is as clearly demonstrated to her as humanly possible.

Between these two people, who would you consider yourself more like?