Thursday, December 3, 2009

Flume

I google myself. I do so under the pretense of maintaining a professional respectability so that employers will find only the most complimentary information when searching my name. This pretense is a lie. I google myself because I’m a narcissist. But for me narcissism isn’t so much a self-love as self-fascination.
This fascination with myself has led to a competition with other me’s. The rest of the Meg Morleys in the world, thought I don’t think they know that we’re competing.. Meg Morley the London-based belly dancer was hard to beat. But beat she was, and now “I Should Be Deserving To Be To Mars” is the first google search result for Meg Morley. I Should Be Deserving To Be To Mars is the name of my blog. It’s what I want people to know about me, my musing on webpages. Readers know Meg Morley saw this, or Meg Morley thought that. Meg Morley writes this way, therefore, this is Meg Morley.

There are those moments of distance, when I recognize my own existence. When I realize I’m not only my body in a time and place, but something abstract and large. I hate those moments. They feel nervous and strange, as though I’m lost somewhere in the universe. And in those moments my name is all I have to bring me back to earth. Because when floating through the stars, headed toward a black-hole of uncertainty, battered by the same question, “who am I?” I can answer, simply, I’m Meg. And again I’m back to Meg, in my time and place, doing what Meg’s doing, sleeping or laughing or writing an essay, unconcerned with the identity-swallowing void that lies beyond.
It’s a delusion of course. A delusion I buy into, because it’s safe. I believe that I’m Meg because it feels nice to believe. But in reality I know that Meg is merely the label for this marked time. My parents gave me Meg because they needed something to call me. Because they knew that others would need something to call me. Because I would grow up and do things, and those things need to belong to someone. But what I really believe is that my existence started before the nurses at Cottonwood Hospital wrote Megan Morley on the medical records 23 years ago, and that my existence will continue after Meg Morley is engraved on my tombstone. I believe that in that void beyond, as scary as it may be and as uncertain as I feel, I’m not Meg. I’m the before and after of Meg.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it? A name. That the name takes you and I places like the top of the google search list, or the class role, or a bank account. But in the end we’re not our name, we’re what we’ve done with our name, and we’re looking back on who we were with our name. Narcissistic? Ok.

3 comments:

  1. very deep. i will ponder this the rest of the day.

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  2. You were born at Cottonwood Hospital, too? How did I not know that? Anyway, you are soooo right.

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  3. Well London-based belly dancer Meg Morley DOES have a video...it couldn't hurt you to have one, right?

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