What I am is what I am

Covid has done away with the duality in our personality. Where we were once primary in our personal relationships and secondary in our professional ones, often interchanging personalities in times of repose and stress, respectively, we now no longer have separate identities for work and play. Something far more basic than mere reactionary change is under construction deep within the human psyche, the desire to connect at a fundamental level, doing away with synthetic niceties and zooming in on what’s important, on the crux of the matter.

On any given day, a person puts on a million faces to deal with the multiple tasks at hand. As stones are thrown, ripples grow in the water; all objectivity is thrown to the winds as one takes on life’s challenges. Because everything is subjective hereon, even objectivity. Sometimes hearts are broken, sometimes homes are broken… All the while, bodies try to repair themselves one cell at a time. But nothing, no conceivable tragedy in our living memory, has had the tragic proportions of the current pandemic. We simply don’t know what to think, what to feel, what to do, what to say. The self-help industry has gone into a tailspin, ironically, needing to help itself before it can help anyone else. Of course, we continue to report facts and stats and tolls in a helpless stupor, but the scream of each of that figure is put on mute. We cannot deal with the epic scale of the mayhem unfolding around us. And that brings us before our own mirrors: what do we see, who are we, really who?

As we confront our own existential angst, whatever spills out as understandings, as a listening, as practical help to others, to anyone, that is what our humaneness is made up of. And we see it precisely now, as a certain measure or quantity, with mathematical correctness – how much are we there for someone else? And where do we continue to strike a false note? This time round we can hear the cacophony clearly in our own verbiage. When we stand up for this or that, we make sure we are true to ourselves. No one is looking over our shoulder anymore. It is just us, alone and without an audience to applaud or censure.

The urge for truth, the urgency for real will keep us grounded is our new hope for the day. We are all biodegradable in the end, we get that. As an old song goes: ‘What I am is what I am. You're what you are or what?’

So we begin a new vocabulary. An alphabet that we have come up with from scratch, fitting the letters into a novel, original script that requires more sentiment than skill. That thing called empathy, which the dictionary defines as ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’, has to be fished out from the back of our mental cupboards and tried on for size. The language of compassion will not allow conscious charity or self-important posturing. All masks are off.