Monday, January 8, 2018

Who are you? (And what are you doing here?)

My name is Mattathias Singh Goldberg Westwood. Having been blessed by my parents with a long and impressive name, I occasionally sought during my youth to make it even longer, adding additional identifiers, such as the patronymic Davidovitch, or de Jesus as a mark of my allegiance to Jesus of Nazareth (after all, the scripture says we are to take his name upon us). Now, I am mostly happy to let the name stand as it is.

But telling you my name is not the same as telling you who I am, for identity at times seems to be layer upon layer of translucent skin, as of an onion, which can be infinitely peeled back to reveal further recursive layers, and at times seems like a box of crayons which have been melted by light and heat into one mass, an indissoluble whole composed of incongruous parts.

I am many things, and it feels like I am all of them at once much more than it feels like they are costumes I can take up and remove. Contra Whitman, I do not contain multitudes, I become multitudes as I ingest culture and history, science and religion and music and literature and humor and experience, and those multitudes become unified in me.

I am interested in questions of identity, of belonging and origin. I am interested in all the things that humans have done and thought and made in their time on Earth, and all the things that have gone on in the universe before us and around us, which we can only perceive with awe. I am interested most of all in the stories we tell to make sense of all of it and how those stories change us and become a part of who we are, how stories change our future and maybe even reach into our past.

I began blogging here in 2009, when personal blogging was at perhaps its highest ebb, and I've continued fitfully, with long breaks during the time I spent as an LDS missionary in Southern India, then during the years when I met, courted and wed the love of my life. For the past two years, this space has served solely as a record of my leisure reading.

Starting this year, I plan to write more, to investigate again who I am, and to say a great deal about what it means to be me, to live inside this skin and think with this particular mind, to have this name, this family, this history, to live in this place and this time and this corner of the vast universe. And I hope that in saying much about being me, I might say a little about what it means to be human, and perhaps even something about what it means to be you.


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