Sheldon

Comments recently have been aired my way that I'm so much like Sheldon Cooper from "The Big Bang Theory." It used to be just Mr. Bean, due to the peculiarities of my movements, which evidently are comical. More recently though, I've been said to act like Sheldon and sound like him, too. Suddenly, I'm a character. It's funny, because I'm unaware that when I'm going about things, I can be seen to be imitating him. 

I'm not thinking I am anybody else; I am just walking, when I'm walking, and suddenly I trip into Sheldon. I'm lost in him. Of course, I don't know it, until they make their comments about it, and then it suddenly hits me how because I behave like something they have seen in a show, the comparison can be drawn, and momentarily I'm recognisable as someone I'm actually not.

There's a little wicker inside me that is snuffed by the thumbs of comments that I'm like Sheldon. Time and space given, the thumbs retract and the flame lights up again. But in the period that I feel... pressed, I feel secondhand, like I'm already known. Moments like that make me aware that I act different, that I speak different, that I walk different, and that I don't know how to do it any differently so that it is natural. It's somewhat of a trap, a little me placed inside four little interrupted lines, ready to cut around. It touches on my self-esteem; it feels like humiliation. It feels like a big secret that everyone else is privy to but I am not, because I can never be outside myself save for when I watch myself on tape or something. But also, I realise, I have nothing to say to it. My mannerisms have been accumulated over time, and I think they come from my own tentative impression of how I ought behave in the world.

That perception, although in constant evolution, I consider a gift. Today, alone, I watched the wind blow through many small, standing weeds around a tree, all of them shivering as if that moment was being fast forwarded.