As an individual, with your death there will be an end of you. But your individuality is not your true and final being, indeed it is rather the mere expression of it; it is not the thing-in-itself but only the phenomenon presented in the form of time, and accordingly has both a beginning and an end. Your being in itself, on the contrary, knows neither time, nor beginning, nor end, nor the limits of a given individuality; hence no individuality can be without it, but it is there in each and all. So that, in the first sense, after death you become nothing; in the second, you are and remain everything. That is why I said that after death you would be all and nothing. 
             Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860)

I do not know who I am. I am nobody and I am you!
At the age of a half-century, as in being fifty, as in being a ‘half-century grrl’ I do not know who or what I really am! I know the socio-cultural definitions of me. I do realize that I am female by my accoutrements (God, I love that word!). I am visibly Black as the culture and society denotes ‘Black’ and ironically its invisibility.
I am overweight...well right now, but any moment I will be a size 8. I am attractive. I am a mother, a wife, an RN, an actor, a comedian, a writer, a stereotype, an affront. At times, I am successful and not successful.

Thanks to my daughter and Son-in-Law, I am a grandmother (oh my Gawd!). I am a once divorced now firmly (well firm for me considering my past relationships; firm in the sense that I have gained over 50 additional pounds in seventeen years of marriage!) married woman. I am a WOMAN! And, most definitely Simone deBeauvoir’s 'other.' I am intellectually gifted, rich yet economically wanting. I am middle class with aspirations and surely delusions of grandeur. I see the reflection of my supposed self when my selves bounce off the faces of others. My self, being who they think I am and what I am.

Still, I still do not see ‘myself’ just their experience of me that lends itself to their definition of me; and this philosophy, comes to mind: "believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if i have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense. -buddha In a sense, my self is like my back. I have never seen my back personally just its reflection in a mirror, yet it is there. This unknowing is seems comparable to the parable of the prisoners and the shadows in Plato's Republic. Yet, I have sought myself outside of the shadows and the cave. I remain with scant and transitory albeit selective wisdom, still a prisoner, still a captive of me.

Perhaps, my dilemma is more a Cartesian paradigm of wondering if I exist as an existential exercise. No! I exist! I feel the jarring birth of my existence repeatedly in the gaps between pure happiness and sporadic contentment.

In the stillness of night, when I am alone, I wait for 'me' to come. I listen and look around in the darkness. I lie still and wait like a virgin for the introduction of something familiar yet strange to me of me. I wait in the noise of culture and in the stillness; the noise of culture still defines me in lieu of the 'me.' What is so frustrating is I have lived so long in this body, this house that begs understanding and meaning especially now that I am at the half-century mark! In my thinking, everything should be clear and known!

Yet, the pureness of who and what I am without the labeling of the outside, the culture eludes me! Now, I wonder if it is possible, truly possible to be whom I am; or who we really are? I wonder if I will ever tap fully that essence of me. The socialization and pigeonholing of our distinct selves starts at the point of our conception and speeds forward in our birth to our many individual deaths.

I remember in my fatalistic youth in the interval betweens the hormonal rages of my periods that I wanted to be dead by the time I was forty-five years old. Forty-five seemed a fitting age to kick off especially when stated from the distance of youth. Then lo and behold, I had my son when I was 42 years old; although, I still tell people that I was 41 years old when I had Chance, as if it is a big fucking difference! It was a week to my birthday, but I held on to 41 as if it was a life raft.

The closer I got to that 45th birthday, I sweated a bit. I mean, I am used to having my cosmic requests and/or wishes answered at the appropriate time. I prayed that the creator ignored the wailing of my then age specific angst. She did! Now, I have given birth to my third child. This has been my most difficult birth. I have been in labor for almost forty years! Here it is, my Notes From the Mothership.
My first child, conceived in thought at the age of about eleven years old. At the time, I was a precocious and brooding pre-teen who hallowed out a sanctuary of a bedroom (a room of ones own) in our home, on Grantwood, my childhood street. The room had started out as a junk room, a dumping ground for the extras in the house.

I commandeered the room, cleaned it, and began piecing my life together in that room. In my artistic right, I anticipated my future in those collages that I placed on the wall at the foot of my bed. Intuitively, I pulled and taped together the fractured elements of my life in that junk room.

Those collages became talismans to my future self. I made a promise to myself looking at one of my creations, I will one day write a book that will be on The New York Times Bestsellers list for the longest time and the name of the book would be Notes From the Mothership! One thing changed with that affirmation, the title of the book. The title now is 'Notes From the MotherShip~The Naked Invisibles.'

I went through the necessary scarification to complete the title and the book!
 
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