Notions of personhood
It’s not unusual in childhood to mark whatever we saw on the telly or on the net as something that belongs to another world, unaccesible. I had a strange relationship with the images I watched on the screen because I ended up convinced that anything that I desired that wasn’t inmediate was out of reach. And when you fail to conform to any arbritary norm, and the world through media and through your surroundings make sure you don’t forget, you start to ponder if the reason you haven’t experienced certain things are consequences of something being wrong with you, of a fixed nature. I ended up convincing myself that I wasn’t them, therefore I would never experience beyond what the world expected of me, what I truly desired. And I knew that what I desired came from a place not of acceptance, not of fitting an external idea, but exploring ways of inhabiting the world based on what I truly cared about, the values I came to conceive based on experience and reflection.
It’s a bizarre feeling to step outside of yourself and seeing you on the same level of humanity and complexity as anyone else. Today, wanting to get outside my mind for a little while, I watched The English Patient. I felt a recognition of the richness that each character embodied. I didn’t feel a separation between the screen and me anymore. Whatever norm that was set for me to weigh on my value as a human being has disappeared. I had been looking for a sense of tranquility for a very long time, and being forced to reduce socialization to a bare minimun, allows you to breathe within yourself and reflect on how you came to be, no shame any longer, just compassion, regret, joy and full-on understanding.
It’s rather a scary process to step out of whatever you were supposed to be, to fail to whatever expectations you had internalized and you had no decision upon them, and it’s incredibly freeing. It’s a tender sense of vulnerability, tender because of its openness, its courage. I want to believe that as longer as I dare to inhabit within all my complexities and contradictions, as long as I’m honest with my story, I’m making space for some of the people I encounter to do the same, and as those four characters that find themselves in a monastery in the middle of nowhere during war times, we might together build our own bubble, where there’s no bounds to our humanity, and we’re free to tear apart layer after layer in the infinite play of revelation and change.
