Myself

Have you ever had a Déjà vu?

Howdy y'all... I've put a new look on this blog, although I said I wouldn't. But, then again, I was lost. Now I might have found myself again, yet I'm confused. A bit. Funny, isn't it?
I also wrote about the design and about me a bit, check out the About me page.

Lately I've asked myself (over and over) Who am I?, and mostly Who am I for you? And I asked others as well. Gee, it's so nice to know that I'm constantly misjudged and misinterpreted by most people around me...

... but I'm sort of asking for it. It takes a long time for someone to get to know me (or at least to think so), and I always end up doing something new and apparently prove them wrong. Again. "I didn't think you were this way..."
This has simultaneously been my excess and my deficiency... a problem and a solution, ability and inability to recognize who I am, more in the eyes of others rather than my own. I know much of who I am, but others don't. I guess it's true for everyone, to some extent, that people see as much of who you are as possible, but almost never all. However, for me, it's weirder than that...

I suffer from Déjà vu (since I was very little), meaning I feel something happening now has previously taken place in the past, in a strange way. Those of you who have had any Déjà vu feeling at all know how it is like. When I was little I was very confused about this and nothing more - I just figured "hey, I must've dreamt about this before", or "this happened yesterday too", but I knew I couldn't exactly point out what it was that made me feel I had been there before, what triggered the feeling. For some periods of time I thought I was paranoid, or weird. There were weeks when I had a Déjà vu each day, which was amazing. Those weeks were golden for inspirational writing and thinking in general. I always thought Déjà vu's helped me figure out a lot of things about myself that otherwise would probably be unknown to me. A Déjà vu is not exactly like a revelation, even though it feels like that a bit. You're somewhere, sometime and a minor detail of what you're seeing, hearing, or feeling in any way triggers your brain - "this happened before", and you start detaching from reality...

... or at least that's how it works for me. And then I think and think, try to look back and remember: where did I stumble upon this again, what happened before that got me here... again. Again is the key word. Hence, with time, I desperately (well, not quite, but a bit) tried to figure out what made me have them, and I feel I've constantly gotten better at it. It's great. For one thing because some of the Déjà vu's revealed that I really had been there before (once I remember walking nearby a bus station with a friend, and a bus with a certain number passed by, which actually DID happen again, and the friend remembered that too), and for another thing I remember events that I dreamt about or places I've imagined previously, which I wouldn't have remembered otherwise. The Déjà vu can also be related to premonitions, since, if you feel that you've experienced something before, you could think you know how's the test you're going to take, or what will be the outcome of a challenge you're about to face. Indeed, I have taken a test which I had dreamt before, and it really didn't feel at all like I'm solving problems for the first time. I thought I remembered each answer instead of making it up, and after the test I really didn't remember what the questions were, but I did remember the answers.

As a matter of fact, it's important to point out my belief in Déjà vu's since it answers my question: Why am I this way?
Intense events that happened when I was a kid have a strong influence in my life now. In this case, it made me question the nature of life, reality, and reason. I believe I'm a very open minded person, and one of the other things that makes me... me is my belief that you can pretty much be any way you want. And the weird things I experienced when I was young make me treat weirder things that happen now with much more understanding. But they also make me much harder to understand in the eyes of others.

I've read on Wikipedia that "Many theorists believe that the memory anomaly occurs when one's conscious mind has a slight delay in receiving perceptive input. In other words, the unconscious mind perceives current surroundings before the conscious mind does. This causes one's conscious self to perceive something that is already in one's memory, even though it was in one's memory only a split second before it was perceived."
"the unconscious mind perceives ... before the conscious" - hey, that's exactly what happens to me! Or at least the scientific description of it. My unconscious mind... that sonds scary, it's something in me that I can't control... something in every human being. I'm dreaming, or I'm absent, and then I perceive and it unconsciously hits me... Thankfully, I don't seem to suffer from jamais vu! But I've experienced all three Déjà vu's: Déjà vécu, senti and visité (seen, felt or visited), each of them much more than once. For me 'felt' includes smelled, touched, tasted - all of them! And for most of the time I can remember when and where, or how come. Especially for the most recent ones, although it's been a while...
It's all part of being myself!

What does Déjà vu have to do with how others perceive me? Well, even without Déjà vu I have experienced and lived strange things. As I said in the About me, my life's not very unusual, it's just original, like everyone else's I guess. But I've met a lot of people and almost none of them intuited who I am right. This doesn't mean that they judged me wrong or I thought that they did, it only means they told me, or appeared to be surprised when they found out new things about me (what can I say, maybe I'm exciting, maybe not). Only a few intuited who I am, most of which are my friends. Another couple or so had an idea about parts of me... Well, I probably won't intuit who you are either, I'm just saying this so you can see how hardly ever people really know who you are...

So I have a question for you: How do you know you've found yourself?
It sounds like a basic question, yet I have a few issues I'd like you to consider:
1. Since you probably found yourself after an intense event that changed your life, and then see how the way you feel is so right and so much better than what you had before, you believe that this way is THE WAY to be and live. But how do you know there's no better way? And, isn't it possible that your inertia, your desire to remain where you already feel well, safe, and perhaps even happy - all these make you just not ask this question anymore?
2. Finding yourself often means knowing what you will do and make of your life further on, what's your character and what represents you. However, after a while of being the same self you end up knowing lesser and lesser about who you are. How do you keep in touch with yourself once, supposedly, you have found who you're supposed to be? Your need for certainty and knowledge of this certainty might undermine your ability to understand the new and the unknown. If you've found yourself and you're not changing that (well, at least not much), what's your relationship to you from now on? 'Cause if you've found your character, you've got to have a relationship to it, erm... him/her :) based on what? if you already know...

So I think maybe nobody really knows who he/she is, but just thinks so (in the best of cases; most people recognize they haven't found themselves). I'm beginning to believe that finding yourself is not a teenager-type-o' event, but rather a lifetime achievement, just like happiness... not a goal, but a path. What do you think?