Year: 2006

The other day someone I don’t know added me on MSN, after finding my msn email on the blog. After a small introduction and all, this person asked me to tell them about myself. Being pretty sure the little profile I had on my blog’s “About” page was enough, I sent them its link.
The person told me they had already read it, but what they wanted to know is “Who is Marwen?”
Me being at work at the time, and that being an opener for a very long chat, I apologized that I wouldn’t be able to chat much because I was quite busy, and suggested we talk more later.

Anyway, between myself and I, the question sort of bugged me, and I thought I might be even using my work as an excuse to run away from answering the question.

It’s not the first time I’ve been asked this same question, and although it seems a very simple and easy one, it actually isn’t, it’s a pretty hard question.

The question pretty much asks you to define yourself in a few words, but how can you do that? How can you sum up such a complicated being like yourself, your set of feelings, dreams, ambitions, mistakes, beliefs, opinions and more?
It just can’t be done that simply, it’d take hours to go through even bits of it.

Another annoying thing about this question is that it makes you somehow question yourself on why it’s so hard to answer, and why you can’t come up with a good response right away.
That leads you to question your life and start asking yourself whether you’re actually happy with it all or not. It also gets you thinking of answers you would like to answer to that question, definitions you’d like to have for yourself, how you would like to be and view yourself, which is actually not that bad, because it’s good to do a little review of your life every now and then and see where you are, where you’re heading to, and where you’d like to be going, but when you first meet someone isn’t really the time for one of those reviews.

I know that when most people ask the question, they don’t really mean something that profound, they just expect a little introduction about yourself, but still the answer you give does constitute a big part of their first impression, and more importantly it tells you what you think of yourself.

Other than friendly first encounters, where it matters less, the same question is asked in job interviews, which we all know are some sort of low level psychological warfare, in which the person’s answer to this question could result in him getting or losing the job. The answer has to be a good one, confident and somehow majestic to give you the upper hand and leave an overwhelming impression on the interviewer.
Of course, that is not the time to be having discussions with yourself in your head on whether you’re happy with your life or not; your answer has to be ready and more job oriented, which actually makes it easier, well for me at least, because I’m quite proud of my career life so far.

Anyway, if someone were to ask me now “Who is Marwen?”, I think I’d answer that I am a lot of things, that I’m still discovering it all myself, and that the first place anyone could go to begin to know me is my blog where I’ve been writing for over 3 years, documenting some of my thoughts, bits of my life, events and news that touched me and more.
After all what is a person but his thoughts, doings and dreams mashed up together?