Who do you think you are?

A friend of mine from Aberdeen ended up moving back to the US the same time we moved back to Canada. We spoke a few months after our moves and she told me that her 13 year old daughter was taking FOREVER in the morning getting ready for school. Every morning she would deliberate over the perfect outfit, how to style her hair, the pink striped bag vs the green damask patterned bag. The details of her 'look' mushroomed into nuclearly important statements of who she was. One day her mom said "Paige, your looks shouldn't matter this much. Why don't you go to school and just be yourself?"

Paige replied "Well, I don't know who that is."

That story comes to my mind every once in a while and it did again this morning as I was reading an excerpt from The Cocktail Party by T.S. Elliot:

"We die to each other daily.

What we know of other people

Is only our memory of the moments

During which we knew them.

And they have changed since then.

To pretend that they and we are the same

Is a useful and convenient social convention

Which must sometimes be broken.

We must also remember

That at every meeting, we are meeting a stranger....

You're still trying to invent a personality for me

Which will only keep me away from myself."