I have never been one to fall asleep very easily — I tend to need to sit with the inky darkness and the piercing silence of the night for a good while before I can truly drift off. While the constant waiting in anticipation for the nothingness of sleep can certainly be trying and monotonous at times, as the unabating night and all its accidents really do tend to slowly chip away at one’s sanity, I try to make the most of these moments of borderline insomnia, using the empty time to get some “thinking” done. 

I put thinking in quotations here because what is often actually occurring can in no way be deemed intellectual, as what pops into my head is, at best, terribly banal (“What did I eat today?”), or, at worst, outright ridiculous (“In what ways would my life have been better if the Bengals had actually won that Super Bowl?”). Yet, every now and again, when in the throes of these terribly trivial thoughts, something semi-important does somehow find its way into my mind. And recently this has actually been occurring rather regularly, my mindless nights consistently being disrupted by the same singular, recurring thought: Do I — the singular, individual “I” — even exist?

The source of this nagging question is, embarrassingly, beyond stupid, but probably nevertheless requires elaboration. It all stems from a quiet night in a messy O’Hare dorm room, when, in the midst of discovering new music, I stumbled across a song titled “Walden Pond” by an indie band called Atta Boy. Naturally, one thing led to another, and I soon found myself sitting on the floor, reading the collective works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was while I was wrapped up in his prose that I stumbled across the source of my troubles: the phrase “imitation is suicide.” These three words struck me as odd and foreign initially, but they remained. They remained and they remained, until, after sitting with them in the darkness of the following nights, thinking about how emulation is the razor blade by which we kill the individuality that defines our singular human existence, I arrived at a terrifying realization: if imitation is suicide, then I have killed myself a thousand times over. 

I say this because there really is nothing truly unique about me; every characteristic of mine is an imitation or cheap copy of someone else’s. My physical appearance is not solely my own because there is someone else wandering this earth who looks like me: my twin brother. My mannerisms are largely just those of my parents and close friends, as my eccentricities, manner of speaking and habitual tendencies are really nothing more than learned behaviors that I subconsciously picked up throughout the years. Even those guiding intellectual or ethical principles that I strive to live by are not my own, instead being those of certain thinkers that I have come across and chosen to appropriate. My outlook on these terrifying yet beautiful lives that we live was boosted straight from the pages of a Fyodor Dostoevsky novel; my goal to see the world with an innocent eye — one devoid of prior associations — was stolen straight off the brush and canvases of Claude Monet; and my overly pretentious writing style is nothing more than a bastardization of the beautiful prose that was originally authored by the immortal James Baldwin. 

Considering all of this appropriation and unoriginality, do I really have any claim to existence? Can I honestly sit here and say that I haven’t brutally killed any sort of individuality that I once had, effectively condemning my singular sense of self to the murky depths of non-existence through the constant emulation of influences? 

Regardless, all of this rambling and melodramatic absurdity leads me to this potentially happier concluding point: maybe this sense, this feeling of mine that I lack a living, breathing identity that I can use as proof of my existence, is why I have been so drawn to the Ram. By getting to sit down and write an article each week, I am afforded a blank slate upon which I can carve out some sense of true individuality by thinking or doing something that has never been done before. Perhaps this opportunity for novelty is what motivated me to reach out to Nick (Volume 104’s sports editor) after I first met him at the club fair, what called me to continuously send emails pitching odd and esoteric blog ideas that nobody would ever read and what led me to want to become a more regular patron of the chairs of B-52 through an editorship. Maybe the Ram was, in the words of Emerson, a way for me to “go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”