< owning things

~dwaynan

This -- ownership, the connection between possessions and identity, or ownership and personhood -- is a subject that I think about quite a lot, but haven't ever really been able to say much about, or even reach personal conclusions about.

There was a time that everything I owned fit in a cigar box, and a time before that that everything was borrowed except a single magazine -- a Better Homes & Gardens special about flowers, which I think I still have somewhere. Now I could live fairly comfortably with my own things, even if you took away everything I share with my housemates...but I still haven't really gotten comfortable with owning more things than I can carry on my back. It's not that I would necessarily prefer not to have blankets or a kettle or a spare pair of shoes -- indeed, it's very convenient -- but I just feel...weird about it. When I had very little, everything that I had mattered. Now there are things that I forget about for months in end.

Maybe I am what I possess, and I have trouble keeping track of what I am when I possess too much.

On the other hand, without possessing anything...I left no footprint on the world. There was no proof in my home that I existed. Some of those first and least practical things were the most precious, like pieces of my identity made concrete. I lost three of them over the past two years -- a necklace, a metal pin, and a hairpin someone had engraved for me -- and each time I felt like I'd lost a part of myself. Maybe the items themselves didn't really deserve that kind of emotional attachment, but I think the places they came from did.

Why are we what we possess? Why does so much of me live in what I own? Why is it so important to me to know what belongs to me if my needs are taken care of anyway?

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