rooftop

Identity

I wonder sometimes if the people I call my closest friends are really who I say they are, or if I've created illusions to convince myself that they're as perfect as I see them. Do I even know them, or just my version of them? Maybe they act a certain way with me, and differently with other people. Maybe they're not who I think they are, and we're not actually as close as I thought. Maybe the person I go to with all my problems doesn't actually want to hear them, or the person I text all the time wishes I'd leave them alone. Or, even worse, maybe someone just pretends to like my writing to be nice (gasp).
But then, who are they? Are they who I think they are, or who they think they are? Or are they the gray area somewhere in between? Identity is absolute, but it can also be relative. It's weird like that. I guess you could say it's relatively absolute (or absolutely relative?). I guess it's all of the above, to some degree. We're the sum of our reputations (because what other people think of us probably says a lot more about who we are than what we think of ourselves), but we also get a say. Sort of.
Because it goes even deeper than that, if you peel back another layer. Do we even have any control over who we become? Maybe a little, but the influence of our culture and our upbringing is so strong that at the end of the day we couldn't have turned out any different, all things considered. And if that's true, then we aren't original thinkers - every thought we have is a product of another, from someone else, which they got from someone before them, and so on.

We're like apple seeds, planted in the ground. Sure, we'll grow up to be an apple and call ourselves apples and taste like apples and look like apples, but we'll all still be apples. The kind of apple we become doesn't depend on us, but on the nutrients and sunlight and water that we're fed.
So is there a such thing as identity? Or did we make that up to feel important and unique and special?
It makes me wonder who I am, and what people think. If anything. To bring it back to my original point, you never really know who people are. Nor do you know who you are. And that means a lot of things, like that the amazingly talented person you know and the stunningly gorgeous girl or boy that makes you forget how to flirt are really just apples. Everyone's an apple.
If you don't like that, don't worry about it. It's too big and vague a concept anyway. Hope that clears it all up.