Who am I?

Late at night, when I'm in pain and have consquently taken a large amount of pain killers, when I'm so tired I can't sleep or think in a straight line, I have been known to lay in bed and have some rather Deep and Existential thoughts. On Sunday night one such thought occurred to me:

I am me. No one else is me.

The obvious reply to such a profound utterance is "Duh. Who else are you?" But I have to admit its a concept I dwell on a lot from time to time, usually in these drug-induced semi-comas. I'll try to explain what I mean by "this concept" but its entirely possible I won't be able to articulate exactly what I think or feel. At least not coherently. So please bear with me.

The idea is basically that no one else is in my skin. No one else lives my life and experiences my experiences. At that moment in time, when I had the revelation, no one else was being me. On the flipside, it also spins me out that I am not other people. It's got a lot to do with the fact that we all walk in our own shoes so to speak. Since I was young, I was always imagining life in another's shoes. In many ways I was never satisfied with my mundane existence. Some days I think that side of me hasn't grown up at all.

That isn't to say that I don't like myself. But to be honest, some days I don't exactly like my life. There's a difference. Some days I feel trapped. I'm a young guy, full of life and love and I'm trapped in this tired old body that doesn't work properly. "Frustrating" isn't a strong enough word to describe the feeling.

So who the fuck am I?

This too is something that I think about in those drug-addled states. I mean, you could easilly describe me, but the main "parts" of my life are shared with so many others in the world that they are hardly unique to little ol' me. For example, there's about 6,500,000,000 people in the world. It's estimated that 650,000,000 people are non-heterosexual (that's 10% of the population). There are approx 1,100,000,000 Catholics in the world. God only know how many uni students there are, and how many share the name Daniel. So if I was to define myself by any of these labels, then I'd be sharing that definition with countless millions of other people.

The short answer is "fucked if I know."
But I'll keep you posted.