Day 09: What defines you?

What is this prompt even asking..?

Is this like, what is my defining trait that everybody knows me by, or what gives me and my life meaning?

For the first, I would say a lot of people know me for a few different things. I'm either the girl that hogs the hookah, the girl that can sing and play piano, or the girl that can eat a lot. I am also known as the girl with the natural bitch face, the girl that's being way too loud, or the inconsiderate and rude and arrogant girl. Whoops.

As for the second... I'm honestly not sure what gives me and my life meaning, but I would have to say the answer lies somewhere in my relationship with and respective to people. I would say my life has no meaning if there is nobody else around to live through it with me, i.e. nobody else whose life concurs with mine that I can then share my journey and whatnot with. If my life is unobserved and untouched by other people--and if I have not observed or touched others' lives myself--then what's the point?

As a Christian-turned-agnostic individual, the foundation for the essence and definition of my life shifted from divine proclamation to something more autocratic and, admittedly, arbitrary. Or maybe it's not so arbitrary. But if I am to believe there is no afterlife nor prior life nor other type of nirvana-transcending-time-and-space, then what else could count but this life? I think what gives me comfort in suffering from the idea that there is no God or afterlife is the idea that at least we are all suffering together. Our stories may be forgotten in the shadow of greater individuals and notable events later in the future, but at least they are all unfolding now, in the present, intertwining with others'.

So, yes. What defines me is my place in this world--that is, what and whom I indulge in, along with the when, where, and why of it all.