What we know about ourselves, what we call ourselves, is just a story. We have a name, but it is made up. In my wife’s case, it was made up around age three, when they found her wandering the streets of Seoul, South Korea. They had to make up her birthday too. More than almost anyone else on earth, she knows we are not this story attached to our names.
And it hits me that I am not this name that has been attached to me, and I’m not the story that the voice in my head has written for me, building on the one my parents started. That is not the real me. The map is not the territory.
The real me, and the real you, is not who or what the voice in your head is talking about. You are the one listening. That is the real you. All the rest of this is a story, an invention of humans. The real me, and the real you, do not belong to the fiction that is our culture and our lives. We are two-legged beings on a small planet, and we don’t need names.
We just are.
