Who Am I Anyway?

by Steve Lazarowitz

I have had, according to some, a turbulent life.

Sometimes, I look back, trying to find a thread that connects my earlier years with who and what I am today. There is precious little left of my childhood, teenage years and even my twenties.

It seems that every ten years, I'm doomed to restart my life from scratch. I've been married twice, I've had a couple of long term jobs and basically lived in two different places as an adult. Once you've moved, changed jobs and switched life partners, how much of your life is really left?

Just recently, I found a batch of pictures; a family gathering of some sort. I no longer remember anything about the occasion, though of course, I recognize the people in the photos. Along with a much thinner version of me was a couple of pictures of my first wife. She was very pretty. I tried to think back, to remember what life was like then, but I couldn't.

I could remember individual incidents as if they'd happened to someone else. The events are so far removed from me, it's almost as if I've been reincarnated. It was me, yet it wasn't. I'm not in touch with what I felt back then or why I did the things I did (though I don't believe I'd change any of them, if I had to do it again).

There is something disconcerting about viewing your past life within this life as an outsider. The remnants of the past are like vacation souvenirs. I remember snorkeling in the Cayman Islands, but I don't feel the serenity that accompanied it, in spite of the pictures I'd taken with my underwater camera. The fish are just as pretty, but the image is not the event.

So I started looking through my oldest artifacts. The Doc Savage books, which have somehow remained with me through it all. A single ratty album full of childhood photographs. A Manager of the Year trophy from a now defunct chain of electronic stores. A museum of Steve.

As I wander through halls of thought, I can almost get a pulse on who this man was and why he owned these particular items, but that is where it ends, for the Steve Lazarowitz of ten years ago is a very different man than the one typing these words.

What have I learned from this? I'm not sure I'll ever know. But I know one thing.

The man I left behind was somehow me, just as whoever I might have been in a previous life shares the same soul. There is a thread that runs from that life into this life, tentative as it is. I am the same man.

It is that way with my writings as well. I may flit from genre to genre, article to article, style to style, but within it all, there is something that is uniquely me and will be until the day I die ( perhaps even longer).

Maybe we all need a time to sit down with ourselves and examine our past, without the emotional attachments we've formed along the way. What do our past lives within this life say about us? Have we achieved some of what we'd wanted? Can we push further and reach yet another level of dreams gone by, or have we truly relinquished them?

For me, this is the hardest question of all, for I'm trying to live a dream I'd had as a teenager. I'm working my way towards a career in writing. To that end, I am forced to wonder if that dream is what I want now, or a goal I'd idolized for so long, I just think I want it.

Do I really want to rewrite the same story until I'm sick of seeing it? Do I really want to see another rejection slip? Do I really want to spend my life sitting alone at my computer, instead of hanging out with my friends?

At the moment, I can't say for sure. I think I'll go now, while the question is still fresh in my mind and leave you with these words that might or might not be the last I'll ever write.

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