“Who are you?” asked me, a slightly tipsy lady.
It was autumn of 2004, I was standing behind a bar in a medieval castle turned into a popular hotel in Sussex. It was my first stable job since my arrival in the UK.
“I am a bartender ma’am,” I even had a certificate of my 6-week-long bartending course in London to prove it.
“But, who are you – really?” It was 2004, the year of the biggest extension of the EU in its history, when 10 new countries joined the bloc, also the year when a huge wave of mostly Polish immigrants swept over the British Isles, saturating the job market but not extinguishing yet the initial feeling of novelty.
Somehow it was clear to me what her question referred to.
I didn’t mention more than a dozen years of experience in scouting, the camps I organized or how I became an instructor.
I didn’t mention my love for mountains, the days and nights spent alone high on the mountain ridges, with sparkling stars for company.
I didn’t mention the strength of my friendship with S, or how one winter night in the middle of a frosty mountain trail we found out that the tent, which was supposed to be our shelter for the night, had frozen into a solid rock.
Instead, I told her what she expected to hear.
That I am a recent law graduate from a Polish university, I am trying to improve my English and find a job remotely relevant to my education.
I don’t remember if I mentioned my attempts to study British law in Poland, or that writing my master’s thesis took me almost a year longer than it should, because I decided to write the dissertation in English, for the sake of a planned internship.
Even then I wondered if these strange new circumstances reminded her of the tales she might have heard from her grandmother, of the wave of Russian immigration after the revolution and how her grandma used to ask strangely accented bartenders “who are you, really?”.
At the same time, somewhere in the back of my mind, two thoughts were competing. One was “Is she going to leave a tip?” And the other: “Why should this specific facet of my identity define who I am?”
For years I struggled to determine just for myself, what aspects of my life are most relevant to whom I really am.
Some time ago, I discovered Microsoft’s version of ChatGPT and began to experiment with using it for the purpose of writing content for my blog.
My initial impression was that it was the best thing since sliced bread and that creative writers were doomed.
After a while, though, I practically stopped using it. Whenever I tried to give it prompts and achieve a copy on the desired subject, it flooded me with a stream of florid words, which sounded nothing like what I had in my head.
Gradually I came to the realization that I have my own voice and the results produced by the AI are nothing like it.
Maybe this voice, which surely results from all the various experiences and ways of life I walked, is my true identity?