Face Off

Of the many random thoughts that have drifted through my mind recently, one was "I wonder what it's like to wake up with someone else's face?" It's a common plot device, various movies and books have been based on the concept of living someone else's life for a bit. Tom Hanks in "Big" springs to mind first, but there's been a whole raft of them. I think there was a mother/daughter body-swap thing fairly recently (a year ago or something no doubt, I'm not so current-affairs in the media arena).

There are people who live this surreal moment daily - face recognition is a brain function and thus can malfunction or be damaged. It must be very odd to not recognise your own face in the mirror. It must always feel a little like there's a mime the other side of a window copying your actions. You know (because the same strange thing happened yesterday, and the day before that) that it's just because your brain is a little out of whack, but you'll never quite shake the feeling something is a little off with the guy staring back at you out of the bathroom wall.

In the movies of course, while our hero/heroine is wearing someone else's body, they're still "themselves" and pretty certain they know who that is (they generally even learn something about themselves in the process of course, usually that was the universe's intention in orchestrating the body swap in the first place). So the thought that quickly followed on from the first was: "What about the inverse of that - what does it mean to wake up one morning and realise you're not the person you thought you were?" I suppose in a way, we all fall short of the person we imagine ourselves to be, or the person we think we ought to be, fairly often. For me, I set myself impossibly high standards in everything I do, so failing to be the person I think I should be is a very regular occurrence.

Life has a way of chewing up your best laid plans, your dreams and ideals, and spitting them back at you as twisted shadows of themselves. I think what really defines "who you are" is how you deal with that situation, not the plans themselves or their eventual failure.

I think when I started this post, I had a point. But now I can't think of it. Chalk up another failure.