Who do people say I am?

One of the main things I remember from academic study of human behaviour was the need to approach from three angles; what people do, what people say they do, and what people think they do,beautifully summed up by INXS as

"What you do
and what you say
Do you know the difference
anyway?"

Doing and saying are things which are easily evidenced, imagine a courtroom prosecutor "Do you deny that on the night in question...?", what people do and say might be witnessed and recorded, but what they think is quite a different animal, and not so easily expressed, despite the wonderful story of the footballer who asked the referee the immortal question;

"What would you do if I said you were a cheat?"
"I'd send you off"
"What would you do if I thought you were a cheat?"
"I can't send you off just for thinking"
"In that case, I think you're a cheat!"

Speaking with forked tongue has become so ingrained in our nature that total honesty is the preserve of the very young, very foolish, or very tactless. We even find it hard to be honest with ourselves, that asking the question "Who am I?" can elicit a tall tale.

So it's time to go back-to-basics, write down all the things I can possibly be, and then cross out the ones which don't fit. In the interests of simplicity I have chosen to take a gender neutral approach, avoiding anything which is specific to either gender.

I am a child
I am a sibling
I am a friend
I am a colleague
I am a member of a faith
I am a responsible person
I am a reader
I am a writer
I am a photographer
I am a dreamer

Jumping off the page at me are the three groups that the list can be organised into, those definitions which are reciprocal, those which are complementary, and those which are individual, and it is interesting to see how many fit into each category. My grandmother taught me that "To have a friend is to be a friend", it is an equal and mirrored relationship. "Thou smilest not and he's gagged" tells us that it is the nature of the artist and poet to seek an audience, the responsible person to have charges in their care, it is only possible to be a parent to another who is the child, again there is synergy, although the dynamic of the relationship may not appear equal. But the last two on the list do not fit, I consider myself a photographer and not an artist, the major purpose of my photography is not to display or raise comment, but for personal pleasure, and my dreaming (I was tempted to write the somewhat misleading term "lover") is often not reciprocated or fulfilled by another. Love, sadly, is not dependent on return, although to blossom fully it must be. But in itself, like photography, it is evidence of a very different kind of relationship from the reciprocal and complementary relationships with other human beings, if anything it is evidence of a relationship with the world, or creation,and with the one who created it. And for the human being to be genuinely fulfilled a relationship with the created order is as important as relationships with others, it is a grounding of a benchmark or an anchor point we define our location from, without it we are merely drifting.