I just existed.

     I really don’t know what I would’ve thought if, when I was a kid, somebody handed me a sheet of paper and said, “Okay, write down your likes, dislikes, hobbies, and then summarize yourself in a paragraph.” I didn’t even get on the internet until I was about twenty or twentyone, around 1998. Before that, for me, there just wasn’t an internet. Then I got online and one of the first things it wanted was a profile. Tell us about yourself. I didn’t think anything of it. I guess I like this music. I do this sometimes. Whatever. Fill in the box.
     But lately I’ve been thinking about how weird that actually is. If I’d grown up with that stuff, especially in middle school, I think it would’ve been rocky. When I was a kid, nobody was asking me to figure myself out. I just existed. I watched Transformers. I stared at walls. I stared out windows. I went into town to visit my aunt, walked down to the park, sat there, and sometimes some other kids appeared. Then we played or wandered around or whatever kids do, and eventually everybody disappeared back into their own lives.
     Seventh grade was already a complete disaster because seventh grade is seventh grade.  Then I’d go home and nobody would be there. I didn’t watch T.V. much. I’d go in my room, put on Metallica, Pantera, Anthrax, Primus, Sepultura, whatever, and stare out the window for hours. Master of Puppets playing, trees outside, afternoon light moving across the room. That was it. There wasn’t another layer floating over everything asking, “What kind of person listens to this? What does this say about you? Please choose three interests.”
     I never thought, Who am I? What are my hobbies? What is my identity? Dude, I just listened to stuff and did things.
     Human beings have been trying to figure out what a person actually is for thousands of years. Young me trying to figure out what to put in that box that says “About Me”.
Like, okay.
     That probably would’ve scrambled my thirteen year old brain. At thirteen I wasn’t reflecting. No way. I was moving. I was wandering around town looking for somewhere to go. Sometimes you’d find some weird hiding place behind a convenience store, under some bushes, maybe an old couch back there, and then suddenly there were already some other kids hiding there.
“What are you guys doing here?”
“I don’t know.”
      Then you’d hang out for a while, play something that vaguely counted as a game, talk about nonsense, wander around, and eventually split up. No profiles. No record of the afternoon.
     And I wandered everywhere because nobody was home. I guess my dad thought I was sitting in the house. I wasn’t. I was all over town seeing weird stuff, meeting weird people, drifting through these little pockets of reality that opened up and closed again. I always got home before my dad did. He probably walked through the door at eight and assumed I’d been there the whole time.
     Meanwhile I’d already lived an entire secret day.
Back then, I didn’t have to watch myself being myself. It seems like now that the kids watch themselves. Everything that's done is watched and then discussed instead of just experienced. I don't know what that means.
     I certainly don’t think I’d be the same person if I’d grown up with this level of constant self reflection. I’m not even sure we need the phone and all of this stuff around us every second. It seems crazy.
     There used to be a point where somebody turned off the TV, and that was it. The room changed. Maybe you had a radio going somewhere, but otherwise there was just the house. Silence. Whatever noises were outside. Your own thoughts wandering around looking for something to do.
Then, slowly, the TV just stopped getting turned off.
It stayed on.
    And now everything stays on.
I see my mother in law sometimes. She’s an older baby boomer, and the television is playing in front of her while she’s doing something on her iPad, and then she picks up her phone and checks messages at the same time. Three different streams of information flowing into one person at once. I’m not even sure she realizes how strange that would have looked thirty years ago. And I’m not saying it’s good or bad. I really don’t know. I just wonder if we actually need it. Maybe there was something useful about the television going dark. About the radio ending. About eventually reaching the edge of the available noise and finding nothing waiting behind it.
Just a quiet room.🍂˚ ༘ ೀ⋆｡˚☕️