Who Am I Anyway?

God, I love that song from A Chorus Line: Who am I anyway/Am I my resume?/That is a picture of a person I don't know.

I've just wrapped up one of those office-heavy weeks that had me playing "phone-tag", commuting "off-peak" and performing any number of hyphenated professional cartwheels. On Wednesday I found myself in my fifth major identity crisis of the year when I received a solicitation, addressed to me personally, for a subscription to Office Professional magazine. Seriously. How general is that? It's not even as though it's a magazine for people who go to a certain kind of office. It's just for people who go to any office. Any Office Professional magazine. My left brain screamed "YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB!". My right brain screamed "THIS MEANS EVERYTHING. LITTLE PIECES OF YOU ARE SLIPPING INTO THE STRATOSPHERE AND YOU'RE BECOMING ANOTHER EMPTY BLUE SHIRT!"

I don't have a resume. I haven't had one, professional or creative, for many years. I've built my own work artistically, which means I've never really had to detail my every accomplishment for anyone on paper. And I've worked the same day job for seven years, so there hasn't been anything to update anyway. Yet, I've been thinking maybe it's time to put myself into black and white, get these last seven or eight years down into those tidy little resume paragraphs. Me, concise and easy to understand. But, shit. The resume. Professional or artistic, it's just a mere cinebyte of what I've done--fragments, flashes. I feel like a Picasso painting: abstract lines and skewed blocks of color trying to be a work of art.

So, if I'm not an office professional or a fading commuter, then who the hell am I? I'm thinking about all the "me"s I've been just this week...

Am I the woman on the cover of Scizophrenia Digest on the Scandanavian coffee table in my psychopharmacologist's office? Am I one of the detached, whimsical crazies who walk into her office in a fog and a baseball hat mid-morning on a Thursday?

Am I the woman I see in the reflection of the 5:30 a.m. Amtrak to Philly? Am I one of those commuter zombies staring back at me in the train window across the tracks? A single speck of beige and navy blue in one of two glass stacks on a steel train, surging forward.

Am I the woman thrashing about to Bulgarian dance music at midnight on a Friday, drunk on Astika and freedom and wanting it never to end?

Or am I the woman who just bought plane tickets to Honduras, mental bags already packed, about to embark on a new journey into the world of travel television? Producer, writer, traveler....am I her?

I've been all of these women just this week. I've been so hungry for direction, purpose; for some concrete identity for so long that I've felt panicked, desperate. I want to know who I'm going to be. Abstract painting? Empty shirt? Glossy magazine cover? Or can I just finally come down for a landing somewhere (urban jungle or Honduran jungle--I'll take either) and feel like myself?

The song goes on...