Who I Am

By Sam Gerber

Everyday I wrestle with the reality of a double-life.

In the strategic world I'm vibrant but invisible, staggering but quiet. To the unaware student, teacher or passer-by, to the grocery clerk, the barista and the shoe salesmen my radiance beams from behind a fog. I appear dimly lit around the edges, but nothing special. I live in a world hovering just above the consciousness of most and too visible to those few who go painfully aware of their awareness.

Context is my playground and my heart ache. I track the dynamic interplay of the tiny world to which a heart clings. I feel the teacher's booming depression, the baristas existential nausea and the salesmen's stinging rage. I live in the world, the reality that serves as the base for all others and goes unnoticed standing in the middle of the room screaming. My joy is in feeling rather than coping, transmuting rather than remaining stagnant and living what's true rather than what's safe. I feel like a traveler from the future, used to a world where the unconscious is conscious, where love sources both good and evil, a world where that dichotomy is ridiculous.

My greatest accomplishment lies in every inch of the gap I deconstruct between my insides and my outsides, my success breathes in how that allows my heart to be close to another, and those brilliant moments sourced by my perpetual movement into the world are where my authentic being can finally rest. I work everyday pioneering the art of the single-life, the life where being and expression are one.

This is who I am.