Many people spend their lives trying to become who they are.

Lately, I've been spending most of my time trying to become who I once was.

Somewhere along the line I lost something, a part of myself, and I'm just beginning to find it again.

Perhaps I lost it to my job. Perhaps I lost it to the endless barrage of media and commercials. Perhaps I lost it to American culture. Perhaps I lost it to conservatives. Perhaps I lost it to liberals. Perhaps I lost it to alcohol. Perhaps I lost it to sex. Perhaps I lost it to condo associations and crazy fucking people.

All I know is this: I've been moving further away from myself. I've been forgetting that which is most familiar to me: me.

I open new doors and find the same rooms I once occupied. Everything inside is old and familiar, and yet somehow I don't remember any of it and it makes no sense. I fumble for the light switch, but ultimately give up and sit in the dark.

I rarely feel wonderment, and when I do, it only lasts a moment. But I remember having it once, and I remember it's touch, it's smell, it's taste. It's like citrus on the tongue, it's like a weightlessness in the chest. I'm constantly looking for ways to produce it, to make it last. But it's fickle and, like anything else, gravitates toward youth.

I woke up the other morning to this realization: I'm different than I used to be and I don't really like it. A part of me is vanishing - more than just my hair - something that was important somehow. And as I lay there in my bed, where I've laid each morning for years, a sinking feeling began to come over me and I thought, maybe this is all there is. Maybe what lies ahead is, simply, more forgetting. And the rest of life is one big magic show, a vanishing act, and I'm an amnesiac magician, my awful talent a mystery even to myself.

I'm not sure how it happened, this disappearance. I don't remember having lost it. And so I wonder to myself if there is any way I can find it again when I don't even know where to look. All I know is it's not here now. And it not being here is suddenly and horribly evident.

So I've set about trying to find this thing that is now lost, and it's working, to a degree. I've recovered bits and pieces, found fragments here and there. But it's different. It's like I'm finding copies, bootlegs, not the real deal. Sure they'll pass, but where is the original? And so a greater fear is beginning to take hold: the question of whether or not this thing ever existed in the first place, or if it was just a dream.

FDR made that famous remark in his 1933 Inaugural Address about having nothing to fear (but fear itself). Well, I guess the thing I fear most is nothing. That is, I fear looking for meaning and finding nothing. But I'm also part of a generation that, as Billy Joe says, 'found [its] place in nowhere.' (Let's all give three cheers for quoting FDR and Green Day in the same paragraph.)

At least I can find solace in this: I seem to gravitate toward paradox. I like contradiction. And I've always had a soft spot for the existential crisis. Maybe it's the pursuit that defines and gives meaning.

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