For a good chunk of my life, I viewed myself as not just a self-sufficient but also self-contained entity. My parents didn't know quite what to do with me when we first moved to California, and absent any apparent baby-sitter, simply dropped me off at a bookstore for eight hours at a time. To this day I still have fond memories of that summer, when in lieu of actually purchasing any of Border's merchandise I instead "browsed" my way through their entire young adult section. I'd also made my first trans-Pacific flight alone at age nine (in hindsight not the wisest thing to do), and spent my summers away from home during my later middle school and early high school years. Looking back, some of my natural introverted tendencies can be traced back to these moments; situations in which I've had to keep myself occupied, in which I made do with my own mind in a foreign environment.
I don't think I'm unique in that I sometimes prefer solitude to crowds, or have a need to occasionally remove myself from the world at large. I think many of us have had fantasies of getting away from it all. But I think I always imagined myself as self-contained, a sort of human Swiss army knife - no instruction or supplemental material required. Easily uprooted and transplantable in any soil. And I understood theoretically what homesickness was, but it seemed grossly impractical - something that happened to other people. "Drop me off in a cabin by the woods," I'd say. "Give me some books and a hatchet, and you won't hear from me again."
In some ways, this trip is a test of that old belief. I'm on my own for a fair bit of my travels, with nothing but my own consciousness to keep me company. This is as close to Walden Pond* as I'll get for a while. Case in point: even as I'm writing this, the Swedish countryside is flashing by, deep green plains framed by distant woodland, a flood of black clouds pressing down from above - natural beauty that inspires a whole host of neurological pyrotechnics. The train is full of strangers, people I will never see again. And somewhere in the past, a ten-year old Hans sitting in a Borders is looking up from his book and grinning.
So I guess the old statement still holds true. I am still, technically, a self-contained entity, able to operate and function on my own. What's new is the existence of a "Yes, but."
Yes, I've proven I can fly solo, exist in a vacuum thank-you-very-much, but now I feel the weight of unspoken things, people, tugging gently at me from across the sea. In my two years of college, I've formed attachments, given out little pieces of myself to other people and received some pieces in return. Growing older means accumulating more things, both material and metaphysical. And separation from those things is a kind of emptiness. This is not a surprising discovery. It is in fact very well known, and quite universal. But it acts as a sort of caveat to my old statement - that yes I can Swiss-army-knife my way through life, but that I will now feel a deep unease at doing so.
So I think I've reached a kind of paradox. When I am at school, I am faced with unrelenting social stimuli - the kind of deluge that wears away at the psyche. Being around so many people, 24/7 will do that to you - will cause you both immeasurable happiness but also an undercurrent of unrest. And yet when I am on my own, the stimuli-silence is its own kind of unrelenting deluge. It is the emotional equivalent of having a phantom limb; an absence of people who have become part of you, who you've used as an emotional touchstone.
In the grand scheme of things, this is the type of high-flying abstract first-world problem that deserves its own class of salt, but still, it remains somewhat of a puzzle for me. I think I developed the fundamentals of who I am in reverse: first discovering who I was removed from other people, and then in college discovering who I was in relation to other people. And now the querying of the soul, the question of "who am I" oscillates between these two poles, trying to subsume both but never quite succeeding - the Swiss army knife having splintered into a set of good, honest kitchen utensils, ready for immediate use, for immediate usage by more than one pair of hands.
*People forget sometimes that Thoreau left Walden Pond every one or two days to go down to the village tavern and drink a few beers with his friends.
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