There’s nothing natural about being a person. It’s a project that starts at birth, when other people hold you and expect you to stop crying. As we get older, we learn to imitate how other people behave as persons; how someone bites their nails when they’re nervous or how another makes their tea. Everyone around us is constantly teaching us bits and pieces of how to be a person. Yet, can being a person be solely about imitation?
I like to think that there’s more to me than gestures and rules. Nobody ever taught me how to fall in love with a city or what it feels like to look at a painting and be struck in awe by the shock of colors. Often I’m at loss for words from feeling too much or too little. However, words are all I have to communicate these feelings, and words I have been taught. Words are limiting, just like most things that can be imitated (whether one can ever fully replicate a work of art is up to personal belief). If someone describes me as a girl, they first mean genitals, but foremost they mean I am expected to act a certain way and speak a certain way – be a certain way. Yet, based off that description, someone that doesn’t live with me can’t know that sometimes I don’t like to wear dresses, or that sometimes I’m anything but fragile. Moreover, if we would take the time to outline every single transgression that defines people whenever we try to describe them, communication would be rendered useless.
Is being a person, then, about transcending description? Do we spend our lives trying to be more than others can describe? That seems to me a rather futile goal. It seems counter-productive to try to be something you aren’t capable of understanding, because you’ll need to constantly define it in terms you can understand.
Perhaps, this is the best part about becoming a person: there is an infinity of terms to understand. New languages contain vocabulary that you never knew existed. New people understand your world upside down, because maybe, just maybe, they had to learn to stop crying on their own. New books are testaments to the unrepeatable sound inside one’s head, in a certain mood, in a certain room, at a certain time. New movies give you a glimpse at the never-ending alternate realities of other people. New places allow you reconstruct who you are from the very beginning. There are always more ways to be more of a person, even if you don’t have the words to express it – yet.
