I'm not really one to gripe about people copying me or anyone else.  After all, we are scraps of everything and everyone we see around us that we either like enough to pick up for ourselves or absorb through constant contact.  I pride myself on my personal originality; I like what I like and do what I do, regardless of what anyone else does or thinks, but I do admit that all of my interests aren't unique and there are going to be people out there that like the same kinds of things.  It's inevitable.  However, no one out there can be a carbon copy of me because I am unique in myself.  The same goes for everyone reading this blog; you are you and no one out there can be exactly like you.

What upsets me is when people want to be that carbon copy.  I understand if you spend a lot of time in someone's company, you're going to become quite alike, but there just simply isn't an excuse for the deliberate attempt to become another person.  Wear the same clothes as me or clothes I might pick for you, fine, I have great fashion sense.  Say the phrases I say, fine, I'm totally imitable and funny.  Like the same things as me, fine, I tend to like good things.  But I do not condone a certain person's attempt to literally become me through the blatant (yet poor) imitation of all my personal traits and qualities that make me me on the inside.  It's downright creepy on a level I don't even know how to describe, especially when that person is of the opposite sex.

He and I spent years in each other's company, and I came away from the experience knowing that I'd known a very disturbed individual who also seemed to let his inner struggle with his own vain and exaggerated attempts to fit in somewhere and be his own person (all utter failures) translate into outward behaviors that I shudder to think of.  Nothing of him was his own, and his attempts at human interaction were awkward and fumbling to say the very least.

However, whatever he chose to do with himself all those years, I kept to my own path and continued right on doing the things I'd always done, loving the things I've always loved.  I imagine his tag-alongs and visuals of my own simple pleasures must have set something off inside him, but he wasn't exactly a  smart person nor capable of handling himself very well.  To be him, it must be like waking up in the body of a stork, surrounded by other storks doing stork things.  One creature cannot simply blend straightaway into the larger culture of another, whatever disguise he may adopt.

I know many of you have met someone at some point who is simply "trying too hard."  You instinctively shy away from this person, but at the same time, you feel a little sorry for them in their fawn-like naivety (although he was really no fawn at all).  I was in a position to tell him to stop being that way, to candidly offer advice, and though I did, it fell on deaf ears, like trying to talk down the bull in the China shop.

Still awkward and fumbling, I'm sure, this person has gone on to make some strange amalgamation of myself and that artless attitude of his own.  While I've kept evolving, kept moving toward new realizations and living my own life, he has taken what he knew of me a thrown it like a bone into water to make soup.  While I'm sort of a homebody now as a result of Mike's deployment and my choosing online classes and home time over work and school an hour north of here, at one time, I was feeling trapped and restless, ready to get out of the house and plunge myself headlong into stimulating activities that ran along the lines of my personal interests.  At one time, I would spend the last of the money I had on gas to drive to a political rally/meeting or on tickets for this or that play.  At one time, I struggled to always find new things and new attractions to fill my starving eyes and starving soul with the overflow of beauty those things offered.

He has become the imitation of those shaky scraps of happiness found in this girl's life at that time.  He has become my old language, the constant seeking of more, more, more to fill the holes of my life (although he could hardly know that is what provoked me).  He is what was my behavior in purgatory.  I suppose looking back, even in purgatory, I was an interesting person.  My life bustled and bristled with what anyone looking in could see as excitement and richness.  I thrust myself into history, and a hundred years from now, perhaps someone in a museum will look into a photo of a crowd at some political meeting in some town square and find me or find my box of ticket stubs and memories in some dusty attic, some scrap of paper bearing my name in a place of honor. 

It's eerie to know that he took that piece of my life and turned it to his advantage, applied his mask and used the outward projections of my formerly jumbled inner workings to feign his way into someone's heart and home.  It's eerie and should come to an end.  That piece of me is personal, and while I can do nothing to take it back, I hope that in time, he'll just drop it and let it settle to the dust of time.

I have sympathy for those that struggle with their personal identity.  However, the way to find yourself does not lie in absolutely adopting the personality of someone interesting.  It lies in true and real self-exploration.  And when you've finally found yourself, you'll finally be able to answer clearly, honestly, and validly why you feel the way you do and do the things you do in your own life.  Until the day when your answers are crisp, defined, and passionate in your mind, even when no one is asking, you're still searching, and that's okay.  Just let go of other people's skirts and coat tails and decide for yourself who you really are outside of pure imitation.