...after I had goofed around a little. I was alone in the house, and humans knowing they aren't being watched being what they are, I was silly and wacky. Then, I laughed at my own antics and how stupid they were, as I stood reading a copy of the Boston Herald on the counter. As I looked through the first few pages, a thought crossed my mind: How did I look doing this, doing that? Then it got deeper. I realized that I didn't address myself by my name often, nor did I think of myself completely. True, I thought about my body or pressing matters, but did I think about being a brain in a body, or think about me as myself, or the person in the mirror as me? I walked over to a mirror in the hall, and I stared at myself, talking to myself. My mind could not get itself around this alien concept of... Something. Something relating to me being in this body, this being how others saw me, how my actions made sense to me because of my thoughts but my thoughts were directed by things learned from actions, how strange I must look to other people, or how normal, because of my actions being similar to their actions (almost, I'm quite the weird person), because this pattern for behavior was imprinted on them by witnessing such behavior, in a long string of changing life experiences across the world. I could not grip the core of this foreign idea, yet I could visualize the idea that my mind and actions put together make me a different person than the person other people only observe. But there was something deep in the center of the idea of my mind being within my body, my body and me being one and the same and not an operator and its machinery. I can barely put this experience into words, let alone the concepts I tried to understand. I knew, but I did not understand. The sum of this utterly Freudian ordeal was that I more often than not did not make the connection between I and the person in the mirror. It is a very disturbing thing to be familiar with your face and yet not completely recognize it as your own. I could say the experience triggered by my lackadaisical behavior was an out of body experience, yet unsettlingly enough, it felt like an in-body experience.

Even more terrifying, the fact or realization that you are far more accustomed to the faces and existence of the people around you and the minds driving their actions than your own? And self identity as a whole, in each person, is already complicated enough, with people these days getting a sudden need to frivolously medicalize and psychologize and explain away self-identification and differences in opinion, and going so far as to make up a fancy term with a fancier set of psychological junk to explain being nervous on the first day of school, and then replacing the actual causes with a new list of causes, tagged with their own in-depth "explanations". When you cannot connect to the ports of your own personality, in a world where people are trying to fix everything for their own agendas, where everything absolutely has to have a convoluted personal psycho-motivational explanation for it, does your own face and the mind behind it mean anything? Anything at all?

EDIT: Republished for addition of new content.