The Mimic's Dilemma

When a mimic defines itself as being a mimic, when their identity is fully tied up in they're ability to mimic, who do they become with nobody else is around?

Who is a man made of mirrors when there's naught to reflect?

It's a question that I have asked myself a thousand times. Perhaps even more than that. It's become a sort of personal short hand for me. For a particular kind fo confusion and headache I get after getting to know new people. I can't really explain adequately, but I shall attempt to explain it.

I forget who I am sometimes. It's not amnesia or any issues of memory. The facts of my existence are never effected. My love of cartoons and dungeons and dragons. The love of my parents. The memoires of my childhood. My anger and passion. My history. These never leave me. I never doubt them. The forgetting isn't a madness dying me the details. It's something else.

When I met a person I seek to understand them. I try on every possible level to know the person before me. From what I can see, and what they open up to me about I extrapolate the entirety of their being. Each person I have know and who has opened themselves up to me on whatever level has left a template of their entirety within me. Once you have begun to let me get to know you there is very little if anything you could do that would surprise me. It all becomes a matter of cycling the details of the matter through the template I've created.

Oh? You've decided to take up painting? How lovely. I'm surprised you didn't before.

Now it's not a perfect process. Obviously. Otherwise it would be a superpower. It's limited by the data available, both that which I directly acquire or intuitively construct. However, what I learn about people, they're strengths, weaknesses, virtues, vice, and spiritual gifts, they all effect me.

Each of these templates exist within me. And in many ways who I am is a compilation of the best traits of these templates. Who I am changes depending on who I am around.

That's something that's true for everyone though. We each wear masks. And we have different masks for different situations. The only way I'm different is that my masks go so much deeper. My internal structure shifts to maximize the efficiency of those I am around. I do more then play a role, in some ways I become a different person.

And what I've dubbed the mimic's dilemma, is when in that restructuring I forget which configuration is the real me.

Maybe there is no real me. And when there's no one there to mimic I'm just a blank mirror.

Or maybe I think too much.