Nosce Te Ipsum

I feel like my life would have been meaningless if I never had children.

It's not that I can't imagine what my life would have been like without them.

I think I can imagine it.

I imagine I'd be an older version of who I was when I was younger. I changed the first glorious moment I saw my first son and heard him cry -- changed into someone I needed to be, a better person, but nevertheless a person for the sake of someone else.

I suppose it's a good thing to put someone else before you -- to subjugate yourself and in turn allow yourself the opportunity to be more of something greater. And along the way I think I've learned things I couldn't have learned without the necessity of changing.

However, I'm beginning to feel like I'm missing something.

Like I've set aside who I was -- in particular the traits that can best be described as selfish, idealistic, distant -- but never transformed from it into something I needed to be, both for myself as an individual and for those who need me.

I find myself disconnected from an understanding of my own personal history -- yet a large part of the equation that makes up who I am is founded on the choices I made and the choices that were made for me.

I've lost my desire to be anything that defines me. I've left it to other people to define me.

In time I've come to feel that whoever I wanted to be on my own is not someone I'd like to be.

And then there it still is, waiting for me. The phantom of who I am -- on my own -- waiting for me when I can no longer justify ignoring it.

I used to live only for myself; now I feel like I live only because of my absolute importance to a few people whose lives, through no choice of their own, are intertwined with mine.

And what is that in the end?

A man who speaks to himself when he speaks to God, and hears nothing but the shrill noise of his own mind?

What is that in the end?

Perhaps it's nothing more than an illusion of a person.