Product

Find y

        Who I am
x      Who you are
               y

y is our relationship. In some respects it is a question. What brings us together. I don't know the answer to that, only speculation. If our relationship, however, is the product of who you are and who I am, and assuming that we are different, then our relationship has a different value than the relationship between two other people. You and I, we have something going on based on the ways our tentacles have intertwined. You and the next person, you two have something else going on because your tentacles have intertwined differently. And when I will next meet another person, my tentacles will intertwine according to a different configuration. In effect, the product of two people meeting is never the same.

The product (y) being different for each relationship means that there is one variable that changes every time, that being the 'who you are'. Who I am, in terms of my relationships, always stays the same, as one variable. But the 'you' differs, and to you and I, the product is unique.

When I look at the relationships which involve me, into which I thus have contributed dough and rising, I feel there are many in number. There was a recent period in my life where I had formed many relationships, for want of expanding my social horizons, or other pretexts. They are all different. There is a common flavor in them, yes, but I feel a little possessed by them, and therefore pulled in different directions, because that flavor seems dissolved into the product. To clarify, I feel influenced by the relationships, because I feel involved in their going-ons and inner workings, because those fascinate me from the inside. The 'who I am', ever present in my relationships, I am finding difficulty distinguishing from the (y). Perhaps this would not occur to me as anything of worth save that I have been catching myself lately appropriating my language and way of being to fit in with a particular relationship. It is not simply a 'with some people I am loud, with some quiet' difference - though stripped to its basics it looks like that. Rather, I feel enmeshed and framed by these relationships, as if the product dictates who I am to be. With you I may laugh my ass off about random crap that I would not dare mention to another you lest you be offended. This could be called two-facedness, or n-facedness for those with n faces.

Meeting with people from different worlds, with different expectations, has reminded me that it is difficult to be open with everyone, and therefore to let the 'who I am' be added to the various products. Looking at them then, I find gaps in the ones where I have had to hold back. In those ones, I find one of two desires - to move further and enmesh the dough in so that the product tastes more like me, or to leave from it and abandon the product on the counter. To be honest with myself, I am not always sure what I taste like, because I don't experience myself outside of others very often. I should. With the amount of relationships and the variation that exists between them, I can sort of see an outward self, a general dough that gets mixed in. This self, if forced in a situation where more elements were to be multiplied, such as a group bonding situation, would be very refined, worked-off, weathered by expectations. It is a conformist self, more or less, depending on the freedom allowable in the relationship. It needs to react with the other ingredients and thus has to meet certain conditions which vary from relationship to relationship.

In an earlier post, I talked about how the perceptions of others shape who I am. This post could be a follow-up to that. I feel I have forgotten who I am, because I've been through the process of weathering for each relationship, and each time I may have felt like I had to change the 'who I am' to make a product I perceived would be acceptable. 

I think now to what I wanted. I wanted to be liked. I wanted to be useful, to be needed. I got those things. I wanted my relationships to be open, to be places where vulnerability could be exchanged. I got that, to an extent. I didn't realise that the I who wanted all these relationships to be a certain way would change its mind many times, evolve in terms of what it wanted, forget what it wanted and then wake up lost somewhere in a club, in a car, in the night. I say it because I don't know if I am it anymore. I don't think so. I'm something else. Someone? I still have the moments of wondering, of searching, yes, but I think in their accumulation along the years, speaking from the now, they have made me into a different me. I care about what some people think, I don't care about what others think. What distinguishes them is how much I feel I am in those relationships. The ones where I can be closest to 'me', the ones where I have been most vulnerable, are the ones who I feel much more easily 'changed' by. I'm not who one person says I am. I feel I am more likely to be who many people, or an amount of the right people, say I am. In turn, I don't feel at liberty to assume an I that I am - thus I leave it up to others, and leave myself subjected to this tumble-drying, this weathering, this to-some-extent attempt to be the object of identification rather than doing it myself. I think I am asking people to tell me who I am.

Even among those though, there are some stark differences. I feel the gap in me between who I am and who I am perceived with a slight aversion, a weakness. There is a me for each relationship. Each is the same, but not quite. So the product is different in each case. And each you is different too. My birthday is coming up, and I am thinking about thanking those of you for your place, for what you have shaped, whether you have known it or not. You. And you and you and you. All different products we have made. I am somewhat of a product of our product.

I have been thinking about who I am in different cases, and I'm different, I conclude. How do I reconcile the differences? Take some, leave some? I am reluctant to make such decisions, because I find it hard to anticipate my best interests.

        Who I am
x      Who you are 
Our relationship

Now to find me.