Out of all the people in your life, save your family, who contributed into making you the most you?
I think about this often, but not framed exactly in that manner – for example, I often think about how everyone in my life knows of K and hears me talk about her all the time. In the same way, most of my friends also know about J and A. I believe knowledge of the existence these three people play in my life is essential to understanding me as who I’ve come to be today. But I don’t necessarily think my whole past is restricted to these three people; to my knowledge, all those closest and most important to me know a total of 11 people in my life, 7 of whom have shaped me positively. The remaining 4 also have significantly impacted my past, albeit negatively..
I was curious as to whether other people feel similarly to me (as in, also have key foundational figures in their life), and asked some friends. Here’s what K said:
Which, after asking ES and SH and compiling my own answer into the mix, makes sense. The reason why her number kept increasing is because, after further consideration, we both decided that those who had had negative impacts still counted into the mix. I think the prompt can be easily misunderstood at first to be something more along the lines of, who are your friends that you cannot live without?, which makes it much easier to assemble a list of people that likely exceed the range of 5-10ish. I wouldn’t consider that interpretation of the question “incorrect,” though; I think it just goes to show that people are able to think of many others that they cherish in their lives quite easily, causing the numbers to stack up. However, I think it is also important to recognise that even if there are people from the past who you’ve had terrible, heartbreaking, horrifying experiences with, those events still make up a part of you and thus also require them to be counted into the mix.
Chuck Palahniuk – author of Fight Club – wrote in his book Invisible Monsters: “Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I’ve ever known.” This quote has been reconfigured into so many variations, but the general idea has persisted, the idea that you are made up of bits and pieces of everyone else surrounding you. Personally, I’ve always found this to be true, whether it shows in little daily mantras or sayings you pick up from friends, or your adjusted coffee shop order after countless mornings with a partner, or your night owl routine slowly morphing into one of an early bird. And isn’t it beautiful? To discover individualism is sourced not from one soul, but countless? That, by philosophical definition and long thought, such a thing may not even exist?
Through the years, I’ve grappled through thoughts of my own stubbornly insisting on a life of self reliance, of polarising independence – something that manifested in self-imposed isolation, at times – but it’s times like these, thinking about the people who make me up, who make us all up, that I can both appreciate and accept the inherently social, dependent, and deeply intertwined nature that subsists as humans.
iris garden 