I’ve just started watching The Breakfast Club (I’m around a half hour in) and I thought I would take inspiration from it.

In the movie, five teens are given a full day’s detention and an assignment : write one thousand words about who they think they are. Hmm, let’s see… write a thousand words of deep self-examination about identity.

Yeah, I think I can handle that.

It is a very difficult question for me, however. This is no easy assignment for me. That is the exact reason I am choosing to do it. The challenge and depth of it fascinates me.

So let’s start with the basic and mundane details of me. I am Michael John Bertrand, son of Larry and Betty Bertrand of Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada. I have three siblings, Anne, Catherine, and David. I grew up in Summerside, and went to Parkside Elementary School, then Summerside Intermediate School, then Three Oaks Senior High.

I was born around 10 am on the morning of May the 19th, 1973, in Prince County Hospital. According to witnesses, I was a healthy and happy baby, just a little on the quiet side.

But this is not a biography. I feel the pull of turning this into my life story. It would be so much easier to do than answer the uncomfortable question of who the fuck I really am.

Because I don’t know. I have no true image of myself. Years of toxic self-loathing and lack of real world experiences have thus far prevented me from developing one. I just plain don’t know who I am.

But who does, really? In this modern chaotic age, with all the external sources of identity torn away?

Especially for me, because I have never even had a full time job, let alone a career. Never finished a degree, so it is not like I had to figure out what to do with my life then go for it. I don’t feel close enough to my family (in both sense of close) to get identity from them. No religion either. No party affiliation, no team, no movement, no subculture.

I am a being without external support.

I know a few things about myself. I know I am a nerd. Nerds are my people. I knew that instinctively when I first had a chance to have a group of nerdy friends in college. Nerds are a varied lot, but just knowing someone else is a nerd means I know that I have far more in common with them than with 90 percent of humanity.

It’s amazing, really, how nerds just naturally occur in modern society, like homosexuals, and are then drawn to one another. Nobody has to make that happen. We are a self-sustaining emergent phenomenon.

I also know that I am a writer, and not just because I write this thing every day. I also enjoy writing, and I like to think I am damned good at it as well. I have that deep need to communicate and that feeling that I have something I want to say. But I am too shy and/or antisocial and/or badly under-socialized to tell it to people in person, so I write it down instead.

That way, instead of talking to one or two people, I potentially reach thousands or even millions of people and have a real and lasting effect on their lives, all from the comfort and safety of my agoraphobic little nest here.

It’s big talk for small people.

So obviously nerd plus writer equals science fiction author, although I have also written fantasy. Basically, I just grab whatever bag of metaphors and plot elements seems to fit eh story I want to tell.

Sometimes that’s science fiction and sometimes it’s fantasy. If I want to get deep into things like ghosts or Heaven or magic, I am obviously going to go for fantasy rather than science fiction.

I suppose I could do what Doctor Who does and just write whatever story I want and then tack some science-y explanation on wherever it seems to fit. Those aren’t really ghosts, they are… um… spectral energy beings from another dimension!

What do I have besides nerd and writer. Well, I am definitely an intellectual, which on first blush seems like the same thing as being a nerd but the reality is far different. You think a room full of professors would admit they have anything in common with a convention full of nerds? And how about all those people in opera and the theatre?

Nerd is merely a subset of intellectual. A big one, as it turns out, but still. We are not the only kind of intellectual.

We’re just the best kind.

Besides nerd, writer, and intellectual, I only have descriptors. I’m highly intelligent. I have a lot of raw talent. I suffer from depression. I am obese. I’m funny. I’m charming. I have a big personality. I’m gay.

But what does that all add up to in the end? I have no idea. I get the feeling that I am not the sort of person to whom labels stick. I am just too complicated and multifaceted for that. Which is great for rugged individualism, I suppose, but it does not help much with the identity question.

So I am stuck wondering who and what the fuck I am. So much potential, so little realization, and even less resolution.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. I don’t consider myself a bad person for not knowing, nor do I think everybody but me knows and I am the broken loser who doesn’t. It’s not a question that I feel I absolutely need the answer to.

It’s just that I would really like to know. I am very tired of this identity fog of mine and the effort it takes to hold my shape against the onrushing chaos of identity death. Maybe I should just let myself fall apart and see what happens.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.