Of Contamination

The thing I love about people is how we are always contaminating each other, spreading our Selves, and how paths are always made unique by all these contaminations we receive throughout life.
It's indeed intriguing how at any moment a person can show up out of nowhere and change forever our path.

Sometimes someone influences everything about me, and I feel addicted by these new things in life that person brought me. Pretty much like when I get addicted to a series and I like knowing everything about it.
But sometimes most of these contaminations are more subtle things. I feel I was contaminated by most people I've ever met. At least all those I admired somehow, or those with whom I've shared even the lowest level of intimacy. In my body language one can see the idiosyncratic signs of people I've met during my life. That's why I love imitating whatever fascinates me in someone, but I don't even know if I really do that consciously. The way they talk, the way they gesture themselves, I keep accumulating those little things. In my amalgam of influences, there'll always be subtle signs of people I admire in the words I speak. And I always end up having that good feeling when I notice how I've been contaminated in the moment I see them in my own actions. A drop of their essence poured into me. It's... awesome because I feel these people are already part of me.


Maybe I lack identity, but I think we fool ourselves if we're going to think identity is something unique, uninfluenced. No, (hey, I like saying this kind of "no" like the one Gandalf says that the One Ring can't stay in the Shire, I loved how Ian McKellen delivered that) I think my identity is unique for the sheer fact of being overinfluenced, of having absorved - of keeping absorbing - into myself all things I have ever seen.

And there's one even better thing in all of this.
It's seeing things being contaminated by you. It's seeing your Self being spread into others. Making a difference to someone else's life. I think there's nothing this rewarding in life.