I awake juggling syllables – jingle, jangle, jungle, maybe jonquil – what gives? Syllables, sylph, silky, sulky… why is my brain doing this? Such dream-composing discomposes – a nightmare – or night-stallion – or night-gelding – you’d think from my intensity I was unriddling the Goldbach conjecture (are Goldbachs still currency?).

Are we who we are asleep? Is the topsy-turvydom of our unconscious essential, negligible, irrelevant, none of the above? When I say I, of whom am I speaking? The actor who dons his costume at dawn and recites his script? Or this humiliating babbler filibustering my sleep?

Identity’s humanity’s dirty secret. Henry and other species have none. An identity differentiates. That means comparing. Henry doesn’t. Dogs are dogs and (I suppose) not-rabbits, not-squirrels, not-toads, etc. Who cares what kind of dog? Pure-bred, mutt, rescue, show, so what? A rose is a rose and a dog is a dog. “Comparisons,” quoth Shakespeare (whom I can’t stop quothing), “are odorous.”

I do not know who I am. I used to. As a kid I was who my parents said. I did as I was bid. That I might be anybody else never occurred to me. As an adolescent I sought to differentiate myself: I would not be my dad, dammit! Then my dad died and I thought maybe I had to “fill his shoes” (though his feet were smaller than mine). None of his wardrobe fit me quite, but hey, you are who you are born, not whom you prefer!

Did my dad jingle-jangle-jumble syllables in his sleep? Did he wake perplexed, even disgusted, by his script? Did he long to be other than he was? I’ll never know because dads, in my dad’s view, didn’t discuss such nonsense. You didn’t confide in your kids, you instructed them. Perplexity was perfidy.

Ambitious for esteem, I shrank myself to fit the parental pattern. What a good boy I was! Then my textbook stopped – at age forty-seven – while I continued. Now what? Maybe I wasn’t who I was taught. Who then?

Identity is our necessary fiction. We need to believe we know who we are so we can fit into our world like a jigsaw puzzle piece. My relations, interests, whereabouts, activities, identify me. But are they my identity? How do I reconcile that manic pre-morning word-mangler-mingler with my advertised personality?

Discovering one’s identity is the thrill of being human. Henry never asks, “Who am I really?” The search can be hair-raising, frustrating, exhilarating. The more I wonder, the less I know. I’m always surprising myself – not always pleasantly. The babbler of today’s first paragraph isn’t who I expected. What to make of him?

I write, in part, to wrangle myself. I am what I’ve said – in the way I said it – the evidence is irrefutable. I am also what I’ve dreamt – and what I’ve not done – and whom and what I love – and loathe – and the lies I’ve told – and truths I’ve risked – and the scraps my memory has retained. It is natural to want to arrange all these clues to a comfortable conclusion – this is who I am! – but any confidence on that score is delusory. No one knows who they are – not really – only (at most) who they’ve decided to be.

Some folks enjoy their indeterminacy – it makes a fine adventure of existence. Others angrily deny it. Anyone who knows for darn sure who they are has stopped looking. They cling to their identity like flotsam lest they drown in their confusion.

The syllable-juggling goofball who woke me is as much me as the righteous ranter. In our anxious hour he makes me grin.